Cowboy lump - learning to cook all over again

First thing I noticed was Cowboy has HUGE chunks compared to RO. It appears to be made from a lot of branches vs wood that is chipped into chunks like RO. 

It took longer to get going. I use bacon grease soaked paper towels to light my Egg. It lit just as easily as RO, but it took a bit longer to come up to temp.

It was more stable than RO. Since this was a pizza cook, I light the lump, apply the plate setter, grid, and stone and close the dome. RO, once it gets going good, will send huge flames up around the plate setter. The flames will come up and lick the temp probe and give "false" readings. Closing the bottom vent just a hair will limit the flaming allowing the thermometer to give a more accurate indication of the real temp in there. Cowboy flamed, but just about perfectly. It would flame just slightly above the plate setter with both vents wide open.

Once things really started to roll (I try to hit 550 deg - seems perfect for my pizza recipe), I had a hard time keeping Cowboy under control compared to what I'm used to with RO. This stuff seemed to want to go nuclear on me. With RO, closing the bottom vent just a bit to limit the flaming I mentioned above seems to keep the temp stable at 500-600 which is where I want it. I did three pizzas last night and had my bottom vent closed down 2/3 of the way and she still wanted to run at 600+. The color of the lump was almost white it was burning so hot. I would hate to see what this stuff would burn at if I were to leave vents open and just let'er go. I was cooking these pizzas in a couple of min each to prevent crust from burning. They turned out with a tough crust on bottom and not crisp like we like them (thin crust).

Just some observations in case anyone is curious. I tend to think the larger lump allows much better air flow which results in it burning hotter than RO. I now know that I need to start closing things down a bit sooner to keep my temp where I want it using this stuff.