Raised?

Raised means gasket level, more or less. Most of my cooks seem to be raised direct these days. 400° more often than not. When it stabilizes there, I put the food on. I may open the dome briefly from time to time to check meat temp, but the egg temp doesn't change much or for long. I don't really pay much attention to it. Open it, do what I gotta do, close it and walk away. If it was stable in the first place, it won't vary much.

I've been Eggin' for a few years, now, have two BGEs (medium and large), LOVE cooking on the Eggs, ... and I have never raised my grid!  So many others here do it that I have to believe there's some benefit, and I may try it some day, but so far, I just haven't felt the need.  So please don't get the idea that if you don't raise the grid you're not going to be able to cook perfectly well!

Second, if you could say a little more about exactly what you're cooking, how long the cook is, how often you're opening the dome, and what happens to the temperature, it might help somebody here to figure out what's going on.  I don't feel like opening the dome causes big temperature problems for me, but I might not be cooking whatever you're cooking.  Could you be more specific?

Theo

Raised.

Here is a shot of both raised direct and indirect. The Woo raises the grid to gasket level. It can be used with the setter for indirect or without the setter for raised direct. Note: pay no attention to the Kingsford charcoal in the egg. 

You can also try using less lump on direct cooks to keep the inferno smaller. 

As Michael said, get in, get out walk away and temp will come back. 

I agree, you may not be letting it stabilize, also, how often are you peeking?  Relax and enjoy your cook. 

Put your hand in the smoke and smell it. If your hand smells like bad smoke, your food will too. 

When you see that pretty blue almost clear smoke and the temp is holding steady, cook. 

It really depends on your brand of lump how long that is. 

Grader07 said:
  Would like to try Rockwood.

This will not disappoint^^^^^^^^^^.

Just throw it in when you load your lump. It will smolder just like the lump. You still get the flavor even though you don't see the white wood smoke. 

Where re are you located?

Grader07 said:

Thanks for the pics SGH!!!  I didnt see anything!  Lol.  Ur secret.   Good Lord Dan....  Awesome pic of some ribs

Here's today's spares after 3:10 @ 275.  Note, all i use are 2 bricks and my large bge grate. So you would need to scale down to terracotta feet of some sort and a smaller grid.  You get the idea.

I doubt this is part of the problem, but it occurred to me that if you mostly used the top vent (daisy wheel or Smokeware cap) to control the fire and left the bottom vent much more wide open, that might cause a bigger rush of air to the fire when you open the dome.  I imagine you're closing both top and bottom vents a fair bit, so that's probably not it, but I thought it'd be worth mentioning.

If I have the dome open for very long, like if I'm turning a whole bunch of things, the fire does ramp up some, but I figure it slows down again when I close the dome.  I just cooked a couple of chicken breasts this evening, though almost certainly at a lower temp than you're cooking burgers, and I paid more attention to the thermometer than I usually do when I opened it, and it stayed rock steady at 350, only going down a bit, briefly, when I opened it.

I use raised direct just because it makes it easier to deal with the food!