Realcook Vertical 17 Inch Steel Charcoal Smoker, Heavy Duty Round BBQ Grill for Outdoor Cooking, Black

I wanted a good beginner smoker. I have a Cobb cooker, which is really nice, and works wonderful but is very small. I've also done offset smoking on my regular grill, but was ready to up my game to a real smoker.After looking at many different options, I decided to go with a simple vertical charcoal smoker and this one seemed like a good option.I've done 3 smokes so far and have been pretty happy with the results. I've done ribs, turkey breast, salmon, chicken, brats, pork roast, potatoes, sweet potatoes. Lots of experimenting!!The PROS:- I love the 2 access doors. 1 for the fuel and 1 for the second rack. It makes it easy to access these areas.- I love that it easily comes apart. This allows you to carefully lift off the upper parts to access the fuel or second grate, etc.- It has a big water pan which I've used with water and beer. Seems to help keep the meat moist.- It seems to heat well for smoking. With the water pan, you can have a very hot fire and it still stays in the 250 degree range. Without the pan, it needs less fuel to be at 250-275 range.- Comes with a hooks and fitting to hang meat for smoking. I have not tried that feature yet though.The CONS:- It's rather cheaply made. I have no idea of the durability yet, but you get what you pay for. It's not made of the most robust fittings and materials.- You need to assemble it and tweak some things. I had to bend the doors and door handles a bit to fit better and close more tightly.- The sheet metal brackets that hold the grills in place are not good. They do the job, but should be made out of thicker material. They bend easily when cleaning. I'm going to upgrade these to something better because they are way too flimsy.- Ash buildup/airflow . I don't think the lower part has enough space for ash and the airflow seems restricted by the small lower opening/ash bucket. The coals only burn in the center and the ash builds up. I might try modifying this a bit to achieve better results. Raising the coal grate and adding lower vent holes may help.OVERALL: I believe this is a good low-end vertical smoker. I've been doing my smokes with the water pan in place for the first 2 hours. Then I remove it to get a little more heat and let the dripping fall on the coals for added flavor. I just got a 6-sensor meat digital meat thermometer to use for my next smoke. I don't know how accurate the built-in thermometer is. I'm curious how the heat is distributed in the smoker.I don't think this is a smoker you will hand down to your kids or grand kids. I don't think it's that durable. I plan to use mine a lot this summer and keep it clean and maintained, so we'll see. But the materials and fittings are just ok.That said, I wanted something I could get into cheap and learn from. I think this smoker fits the bill perfectly. My family has loved the ribs & turkey breast. Oh so good! My wife also really loved the smoked sweet potatoes. Smokey creamy goodness!!Update!! 2022 and still having fun with this smoker that I have affectionately named R2-BBQ. It's still a great value to get started with a smoker. I drilled a small hole in the side so I could insert a temp probe to monitor the interior temp when cooking.I realized that a firebox would be a nice addition to keep the charcoal/wood chunks in place. I'm going to try that. Overall, the durability has held up. I store it inside and try to keep it clean and it still looks good after 2 years. It even smells good too!!

Great smoker for the price !!! Of course it isn’t professional quality but great for beginners.

Assembly took about 2 hours by myself at a very casual pace. Not horrible to assemble, but the instructions could be better for certain. I had no shortage of parts and had a few small screws and nuts left over. The unit arrived triple boxed and well packed. The legs of this thing are thick and sturdy, so that part is very impressive. The metal walls of the smoker/grill are somewhat thin, but serviceable enough. The screws are a tad soft, but thankfully were flathead, so you can put a fair amount of torque on them and get a solid assembly. The cooking grates are nice enough and have handles built in, though there are only the rounded screw heads more or less holding the lowest grate that the charcoal sits on in place. That grate just kind of sits on those screw heads. The unit came with 3 chromed cooking grates, which is very nice. The clips that hold the smoker together are kind of flimsy and they are more or less a requirement for this thing to work well. They don't align extremely well and honestly are my biggest complaint about this smoker/grill. I am very handy and can replace these really substandard clips if needed, but they are serviceable at least for now. The aluminum access doors look nice, but are not bead rolled etc to permanently shape it to fit the smoker. They are kind of bent to more or less fit the shape of the smoker walls. In order to get a tighter fit and a MUCH better seal, I flattened them out slightly and bent the internal latch arm to make that fit much tighter, so the natural spring of the material will now force it into the walls of the smoker and form a much better seal than just slapping it on there leaving very large gaps. If you install the doors without fitting them like this, they will leak like mad. When you install the grate supports, use pliers to hold the nut on the inside of the grate support oriented vertically and screw it in from the outside with the head of the screw on the outside. That is the easiest way to install them and it looks way better to boot, though it's not intuitive from looking at that arrangement. The grate supports are thin steel and are very flimsy. They will not stand up to a lot of abuse. Be careful when installing the handles, because two have angled ends for mounting to the rounded sides and one is flat for the top of the smoker. Installing the flat one on the rounded sides could warp or damage that side. The vent on the top fits very nicely and looks very functional. The vent/ash catcher in the bottom looks very neat and looks like it will work very well. This 20" model has an adjustable vent below, which is an absolute must have for one of these charcoal smokers.My opinion thus far is that I got exactly what I paid for. I didn't buy this unit with the expectation that the parts would all be perfectly aligned and would assemble without any difficulty. I knew assembly would be time consuming and I would likely have to do some fitting etc. That being said, the unit looks very functional and the design itself looks like it should turn out some very good BBQ if I do my part and I don't abuse my smoker. I would not recommend transporting this unit after assembly or take it camping etc really. I don't think it would stand up to rough treatment without needing to be repaired afterward. If you do transport it, I would take extreme care doing so.First use - Loaded the smoker up with some Hickory and Pecan chunks and covered those in Kingsford charcoal and fired this bad boy up three days ago. Let it burn in for a while with the vents wide open and the unit got to about 340 degrees with no water in the pan before my Inkbird thermometer maxxed out. The top thermometer read 400 degrees, which seems a tad high to me considering the Inkbird's reading. Wanted a hot and fast smoke with some well trimmed chicken thighs, angus burgers and bratwursts, so left the water out of the pan and loaded two grates down with meat and waited for the harsh white smoke to die down and smell/taste better before loading them into the smoker. Once the meat was loaded in, the temp dropped to 255 and slowly started dropping ending at 230 by the end of the two hours that I smoked everything. There was a lot of surface area of the meat and that was absorbing all the heat and smoke this unit was putting out. Put a lot of charcoal in the bottom of the smoker (nearly a whole bag) and thought the temp would gradually rise instead of drop as the temperature of the meat rose. I was using the "minion method" putting the lit charcoal in a central pile over more unlit charcoal expecting the burn to gradually reach the edges of the smoker evenly spreading as it goes. Unfortunately, the heat spread in only one direction towards the back of the smoker, which I think contributed to the temp drop. My pile of charcoal was kinda thick in the middle and thinner towards the edges. That likely contributed to the gradual temp drop I think as the burn marched toward the back of the smoker and ignored many coals at the front leaving them completely unburned. After I felt that the smoking had commenced to a point that I was happy with, I took off the upper two shells and put the meats directly on the coals and grilled everything to crisp it up nicely. That was a very good idea and I am very happy I did that. I am also happy that this unit has the functionality to grill my food after I smoke it. Operating those tiny side clips to hold everything together etc is kinda tough when they are hot by the way. The ash buildup for a 2 hour smoke was pretty severe overall and I think that had an impact on the amount of heat I was getting as well. I think good quality lump charcoal for longer smokes will be an absolute requirement.The end result, It makes very good BBQ. The smoke flavor was a bit subtle in the burgers, which is expected as beef is a strong flavor by itself that takes a lot to dominate it. The brats were absolutely superb and grilling them crisped up their skin and gave them a nice snap when you bit through. The chicken tasted wonderful, but needed more time in the smoker to loosen it up. The app on my thermometer wants you to eat pink chicken, but that isn't what I am comfortable with. Learning as I go.6/12/20 - Adding my experience with temp stability and second cook. With water or a great deal of cold meat in this baby the temp is very very stable. Its a balancing act though. If you take meat out or wrap it, that changes the heat transfer inside and the temps will climb. Have to adjust the lower vent to control temps and leave the upper vent wide open. Having a pan full of water is great for temp stability and low temp cooking. Once temp is established (gotta give it a while to see where it stabilizes at), it holds very well. My last smoke lasted 7 hours in the smoker using ordinary Kingsford briquettes and it was still going strong holding around 255 on the grate the entire time. I transferred the shoulder to an oven wrapped in foil and finished the cooking there bringing the internal temp of the shoulder to 205 degrees before resting and eating. The ribs I did turned out amazing with wonderful smoke flavor. My shoulder also turned out very nice, but lighter on the smoke as I should have put more wood in there for it once I wrapped the ribs.I LOVE this smoker/grill. It works beautifully once you learn its ways. Highly recommended. Its putting out the most perfumed pecan smoke for me right now and my pork shoulder is soaking it in like a sponge. I have almost no experience with charcoal smokers and I'm putting out very good BBQ with just a little research and due care. This smoker can be "fire and forget" if you don't change anything.One addendum. After smoking for about 5 hours, I had a lot of ash in the catch pan in the bottom and some spilled out of the open vent holes. Thankfully no lit chunks came out etc, but it could have caught my patio on fire had the wood been dryer etc. I will be putting a pan beneath the smoker to catch this stuff going forward.Addendum 2: Getting a lot of rust on the mount for the bottom vent/ash pan. That thing is rusting like crazy and it's only a month old. That's very disconcerting. At the rate this is rusting, I don't expect this smoker to last more than a couple of years max. Dropped it a star for the shocking amount of rust in the very short period of time. Must be some VERY cheap steel.