Guys, regarding the charcoal. Keep in mind, I'm still learning this cooker. I started out the first half of this experiment not really messing with the coals much. I would just do what I could through the access hinges in the grates and firebox. I also noticed that every time I stoked the coals, the temps would jump up about 25 degrees for an hour or two (more on that later). Somewhere in the course of that first night, the temps dropped so that was when I decided I would pay more attention to the coals. Keep in mind, this was something like 17 hours into the cook at this point...that's a long time to go mostly unattended. That was also when I realized it would be really easy to just take the grate and heat deflector off anyways.
The first time I took off the grate and deflector was what you saw. I honestly thought I must have used up most of the coals. My intention was to open the grill up, show that 85 percent of the coals were gone, and I was going to just stir the rest into a pile and then come back a couple hours (or however long it took) and say something like "Wow, 28 hours on one load of charcoal! how cool is that?!"
Once I realized most of my coals were still there, I was like "Oh crap. This is going to take forever." That's when it also occurred to me that opening it up completely each time would be advantageous because you guys could get more of a sense of how fast it was burning through the coals. Also, I kinda wanted to see it myself. Plus, I knew storms were coming and keeping the ash completely clear would give me more control over when I did or didn't serviced the coals.
During the course of this I also figured out that by turning off the temp controller while stoking the coals prevented the 25 degree spike and keeping the ash cleaned out prevented any drops so the cooker pretty much stayed locked in at 225 for the remainder of the cook even with stretches of up to 8 hours at a time (and in stormy weather.). I'm sure it would have gone longer but I was working towards keeping the temps at 225 consistently and giving you guys something to see periodically...which was important particularly after realizing I was done talking to the camera.
So anyways, that's the backstory. It wasn't a perfect experiment by any stretch and I guess it really wasn't really supposed to be...It just gave me a chance to learn my grill a little better and give you guys something interesting to see. I'm sure it would be different with lump or without the temp controller or with meat in it or whatever. There are a million variables.