Americana by Meco Electric Water Smoker - Stainless Steel - 5029

Simple to use

I like this smoker a lot! Easy to set up and use. But based on my last smoker, I was inclined to crank the smoker up to around medium to high as the smoking temperature. Wrong. These elements get real hot and I finally learned to put the smoker on a little less than LOW and it worked great. If you don't use LOW, guaranteed your chunks will fire up.

In 35 years this is the 3rd smoker I have purchased having the same design. The first one, made of steel - element failed after years of use. The second one, made of steel rusted out. For this one, I decided to try stainless steel material. Assembly of the new one is not rocket science but the directions are easy to read but assembly instructions are not clear for a person not mechanical. First use, element easily heated up and able to maintain 225 F environment. Temperature on the gage showed "IDEAL" near the "WARM" side. Wood burned evenly and complete. The slide ports allowing access to wood and pot is a good idea but smoke exits cracks which is not a bad thing but a surprise. A tool is needed to grasp the slide port tab and move it up and down because it's really hot. It would be nice if a piece of insulating material was added to the tab for convivence. Stainless Steel color turned brown wherever smoke touch it and some areas turned blue signifying high heat temperature. For the first run, worked great! Food cooked evenly and was tasty.

Have used for two years with great results. Quality, great customer service from Tennessee, simple to use and clean.

My old Brinkmann smoker was about 20 years old, leaky and wheezing. It was sorely in need of a new heating element -- too bad, no longer available. After shopping around on the internet, I decided on the Meco stainless steel smoker. Easy to assemble, by the way. I haven't done much with it so far since it's December in Maine, if you get my drift (ing snow and cold). But what I did -- a small piece of pork, a ham hock and some steelhead trout on separate occasions -- turned out great! I also like that it's all in one piece so easy to move around. Right now it's on winter respite in the barn, but I'm looking forward to it warming up enough, maybe in March that I can bring it out and do some serious smoking.

6 users found this review helpful

First of all, BBQ Guys get 5 stars. The first smoker we received was bent enough that the lid did not fit no matter how much we tried to shape it into place. Upon contacting BBQ Guys, they immediately sent us a new smoker with a lid that fit perfectly. Now the rest of the story. We followed the directions exactly to cook an 11 lb. organic fresh turkey (expensive!). The directions said to cook a 10 - 12 lb turkey 6 - 8 hours and repeated over and over "Do not peek" while your meat is cooking. We had to put wood chunks in several times, no problem. The water in the pan never evaporated completely, so that was untouched. Nice fragrant smoke was coming out of the cooker. At 6 hours I excitedly got my instant read thermometer ready and we opened the lid. Our beautiful turkey was a shriveled black mess.! The thermometer read 220 degrees! Turkey jerky! Luckily this was an experiment and it wasn't Thanksgiving day. We will try again in the future, but this time I will peek at maybe 4 hours, 5 hours, etc.

I think it would be a nice smoker. But it arrived in a beat up box. It looked like it was a previous return. It had extra tape all over the box and the box was very dirty like it was in some dusty warehouse. The box had even lost it's form. The product was beat up lid does not fit bottom heat shield severely damaged.

I have used these electric smoker for over 10 years and have been pleased and happy with them. This one was a total disappointment. I ordered it and over the pandemic it took a year to come only to have a rivet out of place and the top didn't sit right. Great, they sent me a new on and the top on the new one doesn't sit right. I'm still using my 6 yr old one. I need new one and was excited to get a stainless-steel one but I'm so disappointed that 2 were so poorly designed. Go with the black matted ones they are better designed.