Pit Boss Lockhart Platinum WiFi Review (2026): Pellet Smoker

Why you should trust this review

I bought this Lockhart Platinum myself and have cooked on it for nine months across about 30 sessions. Pit Boss did not provide the unit and had no input into this review. Everything below is from running it in my own yard, including the unglamorous parts like vacuuming ash out of a three-inch cleanout hatch. A dual-chamber smoker has a lot of failure points, and nine months is long enough to find them.

I review outdoor cooking gear, so I have a sense of what separates a marketing claim from a real capability. With this smoker the central question is whether the upper cabinet is a genuine cold-smoke chamber or just a warming box, and the only way to answer that is to actually cold-smoke food in it across a season, which is what I did.

How we evaluated

I ran the lower pellet barrel across its 180 to 500 degree range and the upper cabinet across its 100 to 300 degree range, measuring real temperatures with my own probes rather than the panel readout. I tracked hopper run time on four separate long cooks, monitored how tightly the Wi-Fi app held the setpoint over multi-hour sessions, and tested the cabinet specifically for cold-smoking cheese, bacon, and jerky.

I also paid attention to the maintenance reality. I logged how often the firepot filled with ash, how the wheels behaved on grass versus a hard surface, and how the app connection held across my 95-foot yard. Nine months of cooks gives a clear picture of what is a quirk and what is a recurring chore, and I separated the two.

Dual chamber: cold smoke and hot smoke together

The dual-chamber design is the reason to buy this smoker, and it works. I cold-smoked a four pound block of cheddar at around 110 degrees in the upper cabinet while ribs ran at 250 in the lower barrel at the same time. With the barrel set to 180 and the dampers fully open, the cabinet sat at 105 to 115 degrees even with 60 degree weather outside, which held the cheese firm across a three-hour smoke without melting. That is a genuine cold-smoke capability, not a gimmick.

The capacity is enormous. The 2196 square inches across barrel and cabinet let me run a full packer brisket on the barrel and four racks of jerky in the cabinet simultaneously. For someone who likes to smoke a variety of foods in one session, or who batches jerky and cheese alongside a main cook, the combined area is a real advantage that single-chamber pellet grills cannot match.

Temperature behavior and the cabinet ceiling

The lower barrel held temperature well, and the Wi-Fi app kept the setpoint within roughly 12 degrees across an eight-hour cook in my testing, which is fine for barbecue. The app also pushed a meat-probe alert at my target temperature and held its connection across the full 95-foot run to the far edge of my yard, so I could watch a cook from inside the house without dropouts.

The cabinet has an honest limitation worth understanding before you buy. It runs 30 to 40 degrees below the barrel setpoint, which is exactly what makes the cold-smoking reliable, but it also means the upper chamber struggles to hot-smoke above about 275 degrees. If you imagine running both chambers hot at full temperature, that is not what this design does. The cabinet is a cold-and-low chamber, and once I accepted that, it performed exactly as I wanted it to.

The firepot, hopper, and mobility

The 32 pound hopper is a strong point. Across four long cooks it lasted 22 to 26 hours at 225 degrees depending on outside temperature, which is true overnight capability without a refill alarm. That hopper size is one of the practical reasons this smoker handles long brisket runs without drama.

The firepot is the recurring chore. It filled with ash every four to five cooks and needed a shop-vac, and the cleanout hatch is only about three inches wide, which makes the job fiddlier than it should be. Plan on regular vacuuming if you cook often. The wheels are another small annoyance: six-inch hard plastic that bog down in soft grass, so this is a smoker you want to park on a patio or a hard surface rather than drag across a lawn. Neither issue is a dealbreaker, but both are worth knowing.

Who should buy the Pit Boss Lockhart Platinum?

Buy it if you genuinely want to cold-smoke cheese, bacon, and jerky alongside conventional barbecue, if you want huge combined capacity, and if you value Wi-Fi monitoring with a reliable long-range connection. For a cook who has wanted both a pellet smoker and a separate cold-smoke cabinet, this consolidates both into one footprint.

Skip it if you only ever cook on a single grate and would never use the cabinet, because then you are paying for capability you will not touch. Skip it too if regular firepot vacuuming sounds like more maintenance than you want, or if you need to roll the smoker across grass, where the hard plastic wheels struggle.

The verdict

After nine months and 30 cooks, the Pit Boss Lockhart Platinum is the smoker I recommend to cooks who actually want the cold-smoke cabinet, not just the idea of it. The dual chambers work as advertised, the capacity is genuinely large, the hopper runs overnight, and the app is dependable. The firepot cleaning and the soft-grass wheels are real but minor. If the dual-chamber pitch matches how you cook, this delivers it for far less than buying two separate machines.