I'll preface the results of my first cook with this: unfortunately I don't have pictures because my cell phone sucks at pictures and I'd rather spend my money on knives and barbecue stuff, so technically, my first cook never happened. :slaphead:
So, for my imaginary first cook on my BGE XL, I slowly got the BGE up to 300 with the vent open half way (damper open completely) then closed the vent to 1/4 and it continued to rise in temp to 325. I closed the vent to literally 1 cm., and it stabilized between 275 and 300. The damper was open completely this whole time. I used the daisy wheel (completely open) and got the BGE to be steady at 275. I put about 4 pounds of large Barbecues Galore Hardwood Lump Charcoal and two small chunks of cherry wood. It had no problem going for six hours.
However, I used two frozen racks of ribs and except for the meatiest center portion of the ribs, they came out dry. I had read that BGE's run a little dry when cooking, but did not use a water pan since I hadn't noticed much a difference when using a water pan in my Weber. I also used a plate setter, put a double thickness large sheet of foil and a rectangular cake pan for a drip pan. The flavor was mild and the smoke ring was not pronounced (I did not keep the ribs ice cold before putting them in the BGE), but I think that, again, this is the result of frozen ribs. I did not wrap them after partially cooking them because I wanted to see how the BGE cooked.
Next time, water pan, wrap and FRESH RIBS! But man, it's nice to not have to check charcoal or temp every hour and a half. I saw that I still had a good amount of charcoal left as well.