Audible Alarm

The PartyQ has no audible alarms. All communication about the status of the controller is done with the LED and display. If the LED is flashing red or green, then you know that the cooker temperature is 30 degrees or more too high or low.

Good Neighbor Feature

You may remember that the original BBQ Guru Competitor had a "Good Neighbor Feature" which allowed you to disable the alarm so as not to disturb your neighbors. This feature is implemented on the PartyQ by virtue of the fact that there is no alarm.

Visible Blower Feature

The visible indication of when the blower is actually on or off is the green LED indicator. When the LED shows solid or flashing green, the blower is running.

Power Interruption Feature

The PartyQ will remember your target cooker temperature when power is lost by virtue of its internal memory. However, the unit learns how your cooker reacts to blower changes and uses this information to refine its control algorithm. This information is lost when the unit loses power, so the unit will have to re-learn your cooker when the power is restored. This can take 10-20 minutes.

Ramp Mode Feature

What is Ramp Mode? It doesn't really matter since the PartyQ controller doesn't have it. However, more advanced models have a clever mode in which the controller will lower the cooker temperature once the meat gets close to being done. As the meat temperature rises closer and closer to the target meat temperature, the controller continues to lower the cooker temperature. Ultimately, when the meat temperature reaches the target temperature, the cooker will also be at the meat target temperature. As a result, you can hold your meat at your target temperature as long as the cooker has fuel left to burn.

But like we said, this controller doesn't have it. To implement Ramp Mode, you need to monitor both the food temperature and the cooker temperature and of course, the PartyQ controller only has one probe which monitors the cooker temperature.

Cold Smoking

The PartyQ can in theory control your cooker down to 32° F. With careful fire building in a very airtight cooker, you should be able to do cold smoking.

Learning Your Cooker

As we stated earlier, the PartyQ will learn the characteristics of your cooker and adjust its control algorithm accordingly. We don't know the details of this process, but we'll quote from the PartyQ information:

"The PartyQ's Adaptive Control Strategy is designed to operate with a wide variety of pits by continually learning what the pit is doing and adapting to many factors such as outside air temperature, amount of charcoal, damper settings, etc."

Open Lid Detect Feature

The PartyQ does not have a method of detecting when the lid is open.