Circulation Fan Kit for Electric Smokers

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Auber’s Circulation Fan Kit* can convert your regular electric smoker to a forced-air convection smoker. The benefits of introducing forced convection to a smoker are many:

• Greatly reduce the temperature variation inside a smoker.
• Shorten the cooking time.
• Retaining more moisture in food.

Our blower is compact in size. It doesn’t take much space in the smoker cabinet and it can fit most of smokers on the market. The default mounting option is left-side mount, which is the same as the CIRFAN kit shown in our installation guide. It is suitable for smokers that have doors hinged on the right side. For smokers with doors hinged on the left-side, it is easier to install a right-side mount kit.  If you want to mount right-side mounted fan on smokers that have doors hinged on the right side, please see note 3 below. 

A Common Issue – Heat Distribution in Electric Smokers
A common issue with many electric smokers is that heat is not evenly distributed inside the smoker when the smoker is loaded with multiple pieces of meat. These meat pieces block the radiant heat from the heater on the bottom and they also restrict the natural air flow in the smoker. When smoking at relative low temperature, for example smoking salmon at 150°F, the temperature at the top rack can be more than 20°F lower than the bottom rack. A 20°F difference is a big problem because the cooking time required at 140°F is almost doubled the time needed at 160°F for smoking salmon. In order to get consistent results, people have to take salmon pieces from different shelf at different time.

Introducing a circulation fan inside the smoker to actively circulate the hot air should solve this problem. Many enthusiastic owners of electric smokers had tried to add circulating fans to their smokers. After we explored and tested nearly all the available options, we developed our Air Circulation Kit to address this issue.

Product Features
1. Reduced temperature variation. The performance test that we did on a 4-rack Bradley Smoker (interior 15"W x 11.5"D x 25.5"HT) demonstrates what improvement this kit can bring. In our test, twenty-eight pieces of small cardboard were placed in the smoker to simulate salmon chunks in the smoker. The smoker temperature was controlled at 150°F. Nine temperature sensors were mounted on four different racks. Four tests were done by varying two factors: with or without the fan running (i.e., air circulation), and with or without the simulated loads.  The average temperature, the standard deviation, and temperature difference between the highest reading and the lowest reading from all nine probes were calculated. The results are summarized in the Table 1 below.

Table 1. Air Circulation Kit Performance Testing results.

From the results shown in the Table 1, we can see that when the smoker is fully loaded, the standard deviation was reduced from 7.01°F to 2.99°F, which means that the majority of probes have very close temperature readings.  The temperature difference between the hottest spot and the coldest spot in the smoker was also reduced from 24°F to 11°F.

2. Time-saving cooking. Forced air circulation in the smoker accelerates heat exchange between the food surface and the air. At the default fan speed, it reduces the cooking time by about 18%.

3. Better results. Cooking with a circulation fan can improve the appearance of the cooked food and retain more moisture inside the food as well. The circulated hot air dries the surface of the food faster. This is especially beneficial for smoking salmon because the dried surface can reduce the amount of white stuff (a mixture of protein and water) from oozing out, and so it improves the appearance of the smoked salmon. Furthermore, a shorter smoking time and reduced water evaporation let the food retain more moisture than food cooked without air circulation. In our tests, when the meat temperature reaches the desired value, the salmon smoked with air circulation contains about 2% more water than the salmon smoked without air circulation.

4. Food-safe. Our circulation kit is food safe. The fan that goes inside the smoker is made of food-safe materials only, such as zinc plated steel, aluminum, stainless steel, and food-grade silicone. It does not contain any harmful volatile organic compounds from any paint or plastics. The motor and other components stay outside the smoker. The maximum operating temperature is 400°F, which is higher than the working temperature of the insulation material in most of the electric smokers on the market.

5. Low voltage, safe to operate. The fan runs at 12V DC with less than 0.3A current. It has limited speed and torque. Users do not need to worry about getting hurt from the high voltage or high speed fan blades.

6. Compact size, quiet and uniform air flow. The blower is compact in size. The section inside the smoker is measured 2.0” x 1.9” x 7.1” (H x W x L). It is small enough to fit between the racks of most smokers on the market. For the same amount of CFM air movement, the long cylindrical shape of the blower fin creates a quieter and more uniform air flow than other types of blower.  

7. Easy to install. It is easy to install this Air Circulation Kit. You only need to drill a 0.40" and 0.125" through-holes on the smoker for mounting the fan frame. 

Specifications

Note 1: Currently, the installation instruction is only available for Bradley Smokers. We will keep updating the instructions for other brands of smokers. Please contact us if you want to use it for a different brand of smokers. We will list some of the forum posts by our customers below.
(a) A CIRFAN kit installed on a Masterbuilt 340G smoker (click the link here). 
(b) A CIRFAN kit installed on a Bradley smoker with a Temco 900W heater (click the link here). 

Note 2: Links to the replacement parts: Fan Blade for left-mount (FB-L) and right-mount (FB-R). Silicone Bearing (CFK-Bearing) and Silicone Bushing (CFK-Bushing).

Note 3: For smokers with doors hinged on the right, installing the fan on the right side is more difficult than on the left side. When pushing the motor shaft from outside of the smoker into the bushing of the rotary fin assembly inside of the smoker, you need to hold the rotary fin assembly with one hand, then use the other hand to hold the motor shaft and move them around, until you feel the shaft tip is into the hole of the bushing. Since the hinge of the door is on the right side of Bradley smoker, this becomes difficult to accomplish by a single person, because the door is in the middle of two arms. One way to overcome this is to fix the rotary fin assembly with a piece of tape and make sure the hole of the bushing is close to the center of the threaded tubing. Put a light close to it so that the hole is visible when peeking through the threaded tubing from the smoker's outside. Then use your eye to peek through the threaded tubing to find out the relative position of the hole to the tubing before you push the shaft in.

Note 4: The default mounting tube (50 mm long) only supports wall thickness up to 1.33 inches. If you have a smoker with a thicker wall (up to 2.50 inches), please leave a note with your order during the online checkout process. We can supply the kit with a 75 mm long mounting tube (for a 2.25-inch wall), or an 85 mm long mounting tube (for a 2.50-inch wall). If you have a smoker with a wall thicker than 2.50 inches, you'll have to modify the smoker in order to install the CIRFAN kit.

Note 5: The rated operation temperature for this kit is 350F. When using this kit at 400F, all the metal parts are fine for this temperature, but the silicone parts will fail after 10,000 hours of operation at minimum. 

Note 6: The motor in this kit can accept voltage from up to 24 VDC. The rotation speed of this motor
generally changes linearly with its power supply voltage. If you want to adjust the fan speed, you can use
a 3 ~ 24 VDC Adjustable AC/DC Adapter.

Note 7: Refurbished condition circulation fan kit may be available here. 

[PDF] Installation manual
[Link] Click here to watch the assembly guide (video)
[PDF] CIRFAN Temperature Study Part 1
[PDF] CIRFAN Temperature Study Part 2
[PDF] CIRFAN Temperature Study Part 3 
[PDF] CIRFAN Temperature Study on Smokin-it Smoker

* patent pending