I have somewhat of an update. I was curious to see how much charcoal this thing would use.
This morning I peeked under the lid to see this:
At the start of the cook I had dumped an entire small (15lb) back of K-Blue on the charcoal grate. As you can see it looks like it burned a little less than 1/3 of its supply. I'm estimating about 4lbs of charcoal for the cook. It would have been interesting to let it go until it burned out just to see how long it would have lasted. I'm guessing, just like a WSM, most of this was burned getting things heated up. If we're all buying charcoal on sale like good little Kettle Cookers, then it burned about $1.00-$1.50 worth of coals.
Hopefully this will "extinguish" any worries about these things taking 12-bags to a cook.