I installed the Savannah Stoker on a Yoder YS640 recently and I am happy with the install. It ran the grill fine without issue. It was not very complicated but more in depth than the typical plug and play install on my Traeger. My goal was to install the SSII without damaging the wiring in the grill or the stock controller in case at some point I need to reinstall the stock controller. BMerrill sent me an SSII and another set of leads that had Molex connectors with 12" leads so I could connect the Molex connectors and install my own connectors for the grill connections.
Here is a picture of the wires coming out of the stock controllers:
I checked the voltage of each wire against the body of the grill. This is what I found, left to right:
Blue - Neutral to the hot rod.
Orange - 119V to the hot rod.
Red - 119V to the auger.
Black - Neutral to the auger.
White - 119V to the fan.
Green - Neutral for the fan.
The next 2 wires on the controller went to another place on the controller, IIRC. I remember them not being needed to wire to anything and dismissed them.
The 2 purple wires went to / from the fuse. The SSII has its own fuse wired in so I was not worried about them.
After noting which spade terminals were 119V, I pulled the wire off and marked the spade with a red sharpie.
Auger:
Power In:
The leads that BMerrill sent me all had a colored wire and a white wire. The white wires had a common connection so I knew those were the neutral for each component. The colored wires were the 119V wires. I connected the leads from the SSII to the appropriate place on the grill component.
Power In:
Fan - I did not have insulated connectors when I did the install so I wrapped them with electrical tape. Note that the green/white are the fans and the orange/white are from the SSII:
Auger:
Hot Rod - This one was a little different. The stock wiring used a weatherpack connector. I have not used these before so I purchased the materials to do it correctly. Remember I wanted to keep everything stock so I could simply re-install the stock controller down the road if I wanted. Cost was about $50 shipped (mostly the special crimping tool I could not source locally and shipping) and I could have very easily clipped the weatherpack out and installed connectors I already had for way less than a $1 but that was not part of my goal. I also have a project car I am working on and I plan to use the tools I bought on that as well so in my world it was a sunk cost, either now or later... Any way here is what I purchased:
ACCEL DFI 74812 Weatherproof Electrical 2 Pin Connector (I bought 2 in case I messed up)
Delphi Packard Weatherpack Terminal Release Tool - Just in case I messed up and had to remove a pin.
Delphi Packard Five-cavity Wide-range Crimping Tool 22-12 AWG / 24-14 AWG
Here is a picture of the weatherpack connector:
The stock backing plate for the SSII was too small to fill the hole in the pellet box. I made a new backing plate out of stainless steel and painted it flat black and it was not as flat as the lid on the can but it worked. Here is a picture of the controller installed. Notice the wires for the thermocouple come out of the top alll of the other wires come out of the bottom of the controller.
The last picture is the front of controller installed. Notice the thermocouple wires come out of the front of the pellet box from the bottom hole in the vent. I will run it behind the thermal jacket and into the front of the grill through the door. I made a few changes to my grill and the far left area, above the fire pot is now a charbroil section. I am sure that area will get well above 750* F which is the limit on the SSII thermocouple so I did not want the wires running through the grill in the stock location. More on that later...
Everything works as designed. As far as how well it controls the grill, I have not had a chance to really test it and to be honest, the changes I made to the air flow inside my grill (more on that later) will make my settings not transfer very well to a normal YS640. I have not even ran an auto-tune yet but think it will be necessary. I can tell you that with the fan on the low setting, a t of 20 seconds and running at 8%, I had a flameout within a few minutes, twice. At 9% it ran for a couple hours the first day. The second day it ran for an hour or so and then flamed out. It looks like 10% is the minimum for outL using the low fan speed. Another thing is this grill will dump some pellets in a hurry. A lot more than my Traeger. I am not sure if you can use outH of 100%, at least until you have a real good fire going, even then you may not.
When I find time in the next few weeks, I will run an auto-tune and I will post the changes I made to my grill and do a couple videos of the smoke production which I am thrilled with.
