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

4.0 out of 5 stars

By Gary and Katie - Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2019

Bottomless design marking temperature control difficult.

The realcook 17 inch smoker will get the job done but it is limited. The biggest downfall of this smoker is it's a bottomless design. So there is no vent to adjust the fresh air coming in. This makes temp control very difficult. I used on four different cooks. First time temperature slowly elevated throughout cook. Not to terrible just started at 225 and ended up at 300 after a five hour cook. Second and third time struggled with keeping temperature up where needed. Keep dropping below 200. Fourth time I completed before this review. Had much better results with temperature staying around 225 to 250 during a six hour cook. In the pictures you can see the light around ash pan showing the bottomless design. It is a fairly decent smoker. Just wished it had a bottom with a vent to help control temperature. If this flaw was fixed it would be worth the $99 bucks but without I would have to say no it isn't. Am I happy with it? I would say it's ok for what it is and little more practice I should learn tricks to control temperature. Just wish I would have noticed this flaw before purchased. I might have made a different choice. Quick update, I have been working more with this smoker. I have it under control and it's doing a better job. Just takes a lot of work to maintain your temperature during long smoking times. Using it as a grill I will say it works wonderful. Perfect as a portable grill. I updated my original 3 stars to 4 because of how well it does as a little grill. Still a decent smoker and is made of strong material. Really enjoying it more. Just note it does have limitations.

5.0 out of 5 stars

By AmazonRR - Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2019

Brings me nice meal in the winter.

Your browser does not support HTML5 video. I am a BBQ enthusiast or say I like to do grilling a lot. To me it doesn’t necessary to just be a summer thing. But I want to try smoker grill this time that’s why I got the product. It took me about 30 mins to install the grill, but nothing too crazy or difficult. I bought an extra chimney starter to help light coals, and then dump all into the bottom of the grill, this save a lot of time to get to the recommended 220 degree. Although the whole entire cooking time took about 4 hours, but doing the smoker grill is like a cheating way of doing BBQ. You can just leave it there and do whatever you want during the time when it’s cooking, instead of watching the food all the time as using the BBQ grill. The food turned out great with smoky flavor and well cooked. I have the option to use it as a BBQ grill, I would just need to use the bottom layer. This will be perfect in the summer when camping or do grilling in the park. It’s easy to carry around with a car. Love this product.

1.0 out of 5 stars

By A. Alvarez - Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2020

Coating Peels and Item is Defective

The item is very easy to assemble, HOWEVER, I was glad to fire up the smoker first (without food). The smoker has many many issues and is not worth using (even for a beginner's smoker). Issue #1. The item's material is made of thin gauge steel. Alittle tooooo thin, but that's just my opinion. Issue #2 - The temperature is so difficult to control, even with the bottom air controller. The temperature rises to 600 F and its only when you choke the fire that the temperature drops to about 375 F, but you cant get lower than that. BUT once you choke the fire you ruin the meat and produce alot of creosote (look it up, its not good for you or your meat). Issue #3 - The coating completely peeled!! ON the VERY FIRST FIRE!!! I used it as a BBQ Grill and I had a few charcoals and some hickory wood! Totally peeled and I'm so glad I was not cooking for my family...would I have seen this if I wasnt doing a trial run? Maybe, or maybe not...oh and just an fyi...i used it for the very first time as a BBQ pit. So out of the box, I used it as a BBQ pit (as they said I could) and the coating completely peeled off! Poor quality control... So so so disappointed with this. I'm just going to spend the extra money to get a higher quality product. My health is worth it...

4.0 out of 5 stars

By Slushpuppy154 - Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2020

Outstanding value! Love this smoker!

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.