How much charcoal to use in the smoker?

This isn't something I've seen asked too many places and something I haven't given much thought to, but the last couple of cooks I have either way under or way over did the charcoal. For my smoker and the way I cook, I now will be following this rough guideline

1 chimney full of charcoal for every 3-4 hours of cooking.

This chimney goes in the smoker, before lighting anything. This is also independent of the few pieces of wood I throw in for smokey flavor.

So, for example, today I did drumsticks on the smoker and that was about a 4 hour cook, so I would have done the following.

• Throw a couple of pieces of wood in the fire basket.
• Fill the charcoal chimney with charcoal and dump that into the fire basket.
• Throw a couple of more pieces of wood on top of the charcoal
• Fill the chimney and light it. When the chimney is ready, dump it into the fire basket.
• Put the grate on and give the smoker about 15 minutes to heat up, warm up the grate
• After the 15 minutes, put the food on the grate
• Close up the smoker and leave it alone until I'm ready to pull the grate off.

This will end up in some wasted charcoal, but not too much. And given what a pain it is to get fuel into an upright drum smoker, too little turns into a great big hassle. Given my experience with my smoker over the past year, this should be a good guideline.

As a bonus, my wife picked up one of those back yard metal firepits that can hold a small fire. This ends up being a great place to get the charcoal going. It is easy to move and have near the smoker. Very handy. If you barbecue and don't have a great place to start your chimney, I recommend picking one up. You can probably find one at a garage sale (that's what we did) if you don't want to fork over 50 - 150 bucks simply for a place to start charcoal.