The five numbers that decide the purchase, and the fifteen that exist to fill the page.
Index
How to judge a grill
The spec sheet is written to make you stop reading. These four pages make it readable.
A grill is a box, a controller and a hopper. That is the whole machine. Everything else in the marketing is decoration.
The problem is that the three parts that matter are the three the spec sheet hides. Cooking space includes the warming rack, so the number on the box is not the number you cook on. The controller is called digital whether it holds temperature within 3 degrees or swings 25. And the hopper tells you how long you sleep, not how well the thing smokes.
Once you can read those three things, most grills eliminate themselves. Half the models I started with never made it to a shortlist. They failed on paper, before anyone cooked on them.
None of these pages tells you what to buy. They tell you what to check before you buy. Read them in any order, then go back to the shortlists and the numbers will mean something.
- 01The 5 specs that matter
- 02What $300, $500 and $800 get you
The three tiers, and the one jump where the quality stops being cosmetic.
- 03What size smoker do I need
Three questions instead of a square-inch number nobody can picture.
- 04Charcoal vs pellet smoker
Fuel is a decision about your Saturday before it is a spec.
- 05Traeger vs Pit Boss
What the premium buys, and the one part of it that is not worth paying for.
If you only read one of them, read the tiers. Most of the confusion in this niche disappears once you know what the extra $200 buys.
Get the checklist. It is research, not a course.
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