When I first looked at pellet grills, I weighed up the pros and cons like anyone. I created this site to help others with a bit of smoker knowledge and some good old fashion down to earth know-how. Recently, my brother was looking at pellet grills and I deep dived into the pros and cons with him, that prompted me to put this together for others.
And when you compare charcoal, electric, gas or ceramic egg smokers, there are a lot of variables to compare for sure.
The way I have always thought about pellet grills is that they are more like a wood-fired oven which you stick outside and smoke at low temperatures, rather than comparing it to most of these other types of smokers.
And being wood fired smokers means there burning clean pure hardwood pellets – it’s doesn’t take much to get A-grade smoke with a pellet grill (otherwise known as ‘thin blue smoke’ from them (ok ok, keep the bias away).
And when you have tried with wood and charcoal using the traditional methods like drums, kettles or offset smokers – I can really make a contrast to the pellet grill.
Electric and I know of one gas smoker that has thermostat control like the pellet grill. But if you get a half-decent pellet grill smoker and you have Wi-Fi control around the house or when you shoot off to the shops.
Pellet Grills are BBQ smokers (and grills) that give you convenience.
When I compare the smokers I have had and used, before using a pellet grill for the first time. I was like spending 10 hours opening and closing the airflow and always had to keep one eye on it. It did hold around 225°F, and it was fun back in the day to muck around with charcoal.
But time is precious nowadays.
Even though I still go back to charcoal smoking, when on holiday sometimes, you are at a pellet grill website and it is about my love for pellet grills. So hopefully I can attempt to be a little unbias toward the topic.
Pro’s and Con’s of Wood Pellet Smoker Grills
My brother was comparing the pros and cons of pellet grills against a kamado ceramic egg style smoker grill. Extreme hot temperatures and don’t get me wrong, I think egg smokers are awesome too.
Now I think one of the biggest factors for him was what it looks like and he preferred (as well as his wife) the look of a kamado.
The ‘out of box’ ability of the kamado to produce proper thin crust pizza in 2 minutes was also a factor. At the time I was talking to him, I actually didn’t mention the pizza oven accessories or DIY things you can stick in a pellet grill (which can produce top-notch pizzas too).
But a kamado is designed to go to 700°F whilst most of your midrange, and even high-end pellet grills are more about 400 to 550°F. But if you can retain that heat, you can make a pellet grill a very effective pizza pumping machine (even with pellet grills that go to 450°F max).
OK, now it’s time to get into specifics, here is the quick list I came up with. then some elaboration.
Pros of Wood Pellet Grills
- ‘Set & Forget’ Low & Slow Smoking
- Low Maintenance
- Clean Burning Wood Fired Smoke Flavor
- Easy to Use
- Fast to Start
- No Messy Fuels
- Environmentally Friendly
Cons of Wood Pellet Grills
- Cost Higher than other Grill / Smokers
- Needs Electricity
- Has Technology /Chance of Component Failure
- Searing Needs Heat Retention Tool
‘Set & Forget‘ Low & Slow Smoking
So cheesy but so true.
This is the cornerstone really of why pellet grills are such convenient smokers. It doesn’t matter what type of controller is operating the pellet grill, any reputable brand of pellet grill can hang around that magical 200 to 250°F for hour upon hour. It also produces high-quality wood fire smoked meat or vegetables for that matter, consistently.
Even the smallest pellet grills with the 10-pound pellet hoppers (tank for holding and feeding the pellets into the auger screw) can pump out 9-10 hours of low temp smoking.
When you think about it, you’ve got a thermostat-controlled oven as mentioned. It’s just about waiting until it’s hitting whatever internal temperature you’ve set for meat – fat rendered, soft and delicious.
Pretty much any pellet grill has one or two temperature probes for the internal meat temperature, which is key.
If you want a breakdown of temperature probes and other bits for pellet grill comparison, I put together a tool which compares some decent pellet grills, check them out on this page here.
My brother wasn’t going to be doing a whole lot of low & slow BBQ smoking, he was more thinking about grilling and pizza hence why he went for the ceramic kamado-style.
Low Maintenance
You still need to do a little bit of cleanup after your pellet grill cook, but it really isn’t much, since wood fuel pellets burn pretty cleanly, you end up with a small pile of ash, like half a cup of ash after a long low & slow session of over 8 hours.
A grease bucket collects all your grease and fat that dribbles down the grease tray under your grill plates. If you line the grease bucket you just chuck it in the bin and you can put a fresh one in for the next cook.
I like to do an end of summer clean on the pellet grill and then get things sorted at the start of summer.
As long as you’re not leaving wood pellets in the hopper for too long, like over a month or two, then pellet grills really are low maintenance smoking and grilling.
One tip I learned recently, was at the end of a hot grilling session if you just flip over your grills, you can burn off any leftover residue which makes the cleanup easy as well.
Heatproof gloves help a lot to complete this maneuver.
Clean Burning Wood Fired Smoke Flavor
You hear bbq smoking barbecue veteran say this quite often.
Your smoker should be producing “thin blue smoke“.
For a kettle or offset smoker, you have to get the air and heat right so the combustion is clean to produce it.
Not so much with wood pellets, but with certain hardwood woods you can definitely get different colored smoke, like yellow for instance.
If you have wood combusting cleanly, it will have with enough oxygen and heat, the fire creates a transparent clean burning smoke not a white cloud of puffy smoke – sometimes it’s just about invisible to the eye (especially with pellet grills).
The cool thing about pellet grills, is they are always burning clean and quite often invisible smoke flavor. It’s not actually the smoke that has the flavor it’s the vapor and gases inside the smoke so you don’t end up seeing it, but you sure can taste it.
The type of wood you use whether it’s lighter fruit woods like apple and peach always give a softer some say sweeter flavor. Compared to those heavy hitters like hickory or mesquite which I think are awesome when you mix them with the fruitwoods.
Charcoal definitely is a unique flavor, and guess what, you can get charcoal pellets for your pellet grill if you want too.
Fast to Start
A bit of overlap when it comes to how easy it is to use since this is a factor which applies to a lot of these pros I reckon.
The process is, you fill the hopper with wood pellets, push the start button, turn it to the desired temperature and come back in about 10 to 15 minutes. It goes through a startup cycle and then your way.
I think one of the key things I learned as a newbie, was that you’ve got to keep that firepot pretty clean, it should be habitual to just take out whatever ash is left over after each cook.
I learned the hard way, I was wondering why I couldn’t hold a temperature. Since there is a fan working that needs to have airflow to control the heat, it just needed a cleanout.
I wasn’t cleaning out the firepot, it wasn’t getting enough airflow to make things work properly. It’s just some simple maintenance, lesson learned.
Easy to Use
When it’s cooking traditional barbecue smoked goodness, I don’t really even lift up the lid since I know what temperature is happening on the display and on my phone. The temperature probe is showing me the progress.
Whether you’re spraying the outside of your brisket to cool it down to max out the smoke ring or basting those pork ribs, it’s just normal barbecue smoking here on in – easy peasy.
When it comes to turning it off, it basically has a shutdown sequence which will burn all the pellets in the firepot and let things cool down.
No Messy Fuels
Wood pellets are a very clean fuel, equivalent to a dry chunk of wood. The way a wood pellet is formed is by heating it up, the natural resin glues the pellet into a uniform pellet, once cooled it holds its form.
As much as I’ve tried to use tongs and not touch the charcoal on the kettle grill or kamado. It’s always a bit of a messy business.
Just as long as those wood pellets don’t get wet, and they shouldn’t if you keep them nicely stored in the garage.
You shouldn’t really have any pellets in the hopper even if has a cover on it, since there may be some form of moisture that is trapped inside, leading to performance issues down the track. But I guess it depends on your local climate.
Environmentally Friendly
Charcoal is not a great thing to burn when it comes to the carbon and the methodology of extraction and digging it up.
Now not saying producing pellet grills are all completely 100% clean, but compared to other forms of barbecue smoking and grilling it’s pretty up there as a relatively eco-friendly.
Waste wood is used quite often for wood pellets.
Quite a few years ago I was actually in the biomass pellet wood industry heating business in Europe. And some people know the biomass pellet industry for heating is kind of where it all started for pellet grills. Which now has been around for about 30 years (back in the day there was only Traeger since they had the patent, ended around 2006).
And the wood pellet burners for heating were all about being carbon neutral. The simplest way I could think about it, trees trap carbon dioxide and then you burn them and they release it – approximately carbon neutral.
Wireless Control of Smoker (Optional)
I can see that with the number of questions I get about wifi, this is getting more and more popular. And for good reason, it’s quite unique to have a barbecue smoking tool which is like an oven but you can walk away go to the shops and still know exactly what the temperature is under the hood, and most importantly, inside the meat.
Now, this isn’t standard on all pellet grills but guys like Traeger, RecTec and Green Mountain Grills are definitely advancing the standardization I think of these. Giving more bang for your buck with additional features.
A quick summary of wifi pellet grills – you connect your phone via an app and then have control of the pellet grill by adjusting the smoker temperature or adjusting the probe temperature on-the-fly, pretty cool.
You can also have a direct connection to the pellet grill, but the range can be a bit limited.
If you want a list of pellet grills with Wi-Fi I wrote a post on it check it out here.
Cons of Wood Pellet Grills
- Cost Higher than other Grill / Smokers
- Needs Electricity
- Has Technology /Chance of Component Failure
- Searing Needs Heat Retention Tool
As I mentioned up top, this is an attempt to be unbiased and there are some things which do stick out with the pellet grill and you have to weigh up.
Cost Higher than other Grill / Smokers
You will invest more generally for a decent pellet grill when you’re looking at $400- $1000 compared to one of the cheapest basic electric smokers or charcoal kettle grill for $200, you should be sure its want you to want.
But again you have to make a comparison to something a bit more advanced than a kettle grill smoker. It’s a thermostat-controlled smoking oven. And it can do a pretty decent job of grilling & searing as well.
However, more on searing below.
Needs Electricity
It doesn’t need a lot of electricity but it does need electricity.
There are some Green Mountain Grill pellet grills now designed around 12 volts and if you go for the Prime model it comes with an adapter so you can plug it into a 12V cigarette lighter in a car or a standard power plug outlet.
I’ve seen guys running pellet grills straight off car batteries and they say you can get about 8 -10 hours from the battery, and still turn over the engine. That completely depends on the size of the battery.
So the electricity is needed to keep things going, not just starting it up as well.
Technology/Chance of Component Failure
With anything electrical, there is always a chance of an issue. The good thing is normally if something does wear out or it’s faulty. Most pellet grill components can quite easily be changed. Pellet grills have bits like heating rods that are fairly simple to replace, and that’s expected every 2-4 years depending on use.
When you compare pellet grills to charcoal, offset or kamado smoker. You have very little technology with these types of smokers and it really comes down to 2 factors why these basic smokers work and what needs to be done.
Heat insulation and airflow control.
So this can be completed frustrating or a complete joy – depends purely on your temperament.
Searing Needs Heat Retention Tool
Straight out of the box pellet grills aren’ the best searing tool, here is an example of a standard Traeger grill doing some organic sirloin steaks, they were pretty thin. They came out well but even at 550°F, it would have been good to have a cast-iron pan or griddle at my friend’s place.
The searing is all about getting to that temperature where it’s caramelizing the proteins.
But for those fans of reverse searing, when you’re after those searing hot criss-cross grill marks after smoking/cooking to the internal temperature of desire, then super hot sear. That is definitely when you need some form of heat retention, which negates this downside to a pellet grill.
Grill grates which are some form of the aircraft-grade aluminum are another or some way to hold the heat produced by pellet grill to do some serious searing. Just watch out for the cheapies on the market.
Here is a page with some superb grill grates to get.
So that’s my unbias-ish pros and cons, hope it helped.
