Charbroil H2O electric smoker

My brother recently acquired one of these and is going to try a pork-butt this weekend. I have never used an electric smoker before so besides recipes and wood suggestions I don't have much advice to give him. Has anybody used one of these or one that is similar? I don't believe there is any way of controlling the temperature on this model.

I have one. It does have a temp control dial on it, but it didn't do any good for me. Why? Because I turned it up all the way, put in 3 racks of baby backs and 8 hours later they still weren't done! I think the temp barely reached 200 and I haven't used it since. My advice is have your brother fire 'er up per the instruction manual and after about half an hour, check the grate temperature via a remote thermometer or an oven therm (he needs 225 at least). If his unit is like mine, that butt will never get done. Good luck.

I had one of these for a few months and gave it away. Everything about the Charbroil water smoker is difficult. It is not well made, leaks a lot of heat, the heating element is not very powerfull and thus it is difficult to maintain temps. It is difficult to get SMOKE. I found I had to place unsoaked wood chunks DIRECTLY under/basically supporting the heating element and these would smoke maybe 45 min-1 hr. There is no access door so it is difficult to add water to the water pan without removing the shelves/meat and losing a bunch of heat and thus time. I gave that up and filled it with sterile playground sand covered with foil. That seemed to help keep the temps up. Most forums will point out the the WATER in these water smokers is acting like a heat sink mainly and not moisturizing the food.

All of this given somewhat remove the set it and forget it advantage of an electric as it still required a lot of fiddling around. I gave up and got a Cookshack Electric. Truely a joy to use but not cheap. The GOSM propane unit is probably the way to go for a non-woodburner under $200 range.