Best Pellet Grills Under $500: The Ultimate Review

I've spent numerous hours over the last few weeks testing five of the most popular pellet grills for under $500 I've had a lot of really good food lately so I'm not complaining what I want to do for you today is let you know which is the hands-down absolute best pellet grill for under $500 and I'm gonna tell you the answer to that question in just a second here but then what I want to do is walk you through the testing that I did to come to that conclusion and help you decide which of these pellet grills is probably the best for you for under $500 [Music] [Music] and now after dozens of hours of testing over several weeks the winner of the best pellet grill under $500 is the Austin XL buy pit boss but now let's go have a look at what went into those hours of testing and help you make the best decision on what's the right pellet grill for you so I let the cat out of the bag the Austin XL is my favorite of all of these but it wasn't my favorite for everything so I want to go through the different things I tested and tell you where the Austin wins and where some of the others actually have the advantage the first thing and I feel like one of the most important things about for smoking is is how does it first of all get to temperature and then how consistent is the temperature how long it takes is a big one and the Austin XL really came in on par with all the others which surprised me a little bit considering just how big it is and so therefore just how much it needs to heat up the Austin XL heated from it was thirty degrees out here this morning when I started from 30 degrees to 350 degrees it was there easily within 15 minutes the same goes for most of the others the exceptions being one the trigger tailgater which actually got up to temperature in only about 10 minutes makes sense it's only heating a little teeny tiny space the other one was the Camp Chef the Camp Chef DLX took us almost a half hour before it was up to 350 degrees and to be quite honest that was a little disappointing to me the next criterion I looked at was just the difference between the set temperature and the temperature readout that the that the grill was giving me now all of these were very very close you can see the average I took actually numerous temperatures after the grills were already up to temperature now I will say that during the you know 15 20 30 minutes that it took to get all the grills up to temperature there was some very wild readings and and and huge differences between the temperature on the readout and the thermometer that I put inside there but once they were actually at the set temperature they stayed fairly consistent I randomly measured these at various times and on average they were within a couple of degrees the exception being actually the trigger and again given that it's such a small a small grill and given that it's the inexpensive trigger without the bells and whistles it's I don't know it that might be why but it surprised me a little bit but that the trigger which is the more expensive compared to comparable size grills is the one that actually had the worst temperature control know the readout temperature is not the temperature I care the most about I care what temperature it actually is in the middle of the grill where I'm going to have the meat that I'm smoking and so I stuck some oven thermometers in there just to see what the temperature actually is right in the middle and I compared to that temperature again random times for each one after they had already preheated and here's what I found only a couple of grills were reasonably accurate and that was our Z grills and our Green Mountain grills even the pit-boss was quite a ways off but here's the difference the pit-boss although was off by about 28 degrees it was consistently off by almost exactly the same amount whereas the other two the trigger and the camp chef the difference is varied pretty widely what that tells me is that the fairly extreme cold temperature that I was smoking in this morning probably had an influence on the ability of the pit-boss to be able to keep up given that it's such a big grill now what's impressive to me is that despite the cold temperature the Z grills and the Green Mountain girls Daniel Boone were able to have a fairly close and fairly accurate temperature readout but the only reason why this doesn't completely knock the pit-boss out of the top for me is because that difference was so consistent and the pit-boss has a separate thermometer right on the front that's giving me a better measure of what the temperatures actually like in about the middle of the grill okay one of the most obvious differences between all these grills is just sigh I mean seriously let's look at these two side-by-side how are they anywhere near the same price but let's just talk numbers here you can see here the number of just square inches of the main grilling surfaces of each one of these grills now that's the main lower surface some of these grills have a second rack most of the time I'm probably taking that out because it's in the way even the chickens that I'm smoking they hit that second rack that said for smoking vegetables while I'm smoking something a little bit flatter it's nice to have that extra space now for this next test I wanted to see which of these grills could reasonably sear a steak so I set these all of them to the highest temperature they would go and I let them run for a long time I ran a lot of pellets through these grills and what I found is that first of all we need to know that to sear a steak we need a temperature of between 450 and 500 degrees and in the end only two grills were able to even reach that temperature at a reasonable level now you're seeing here on the screen the highest temperature that each of these grills was able to achieve but that was after over an hour of letting them run at the hottest temperature only two of these grills were able to even reach that temperature in a reasonable timeframe now for this next test I wanted to see how fast the pet the grills used the pellets so I weighed the amount of pellets I put in each grill and I just ran them I've been running these things for hours and hours and hours and I can tell you that these numbers are going to be pretty dang good now no surprise to me that the pit boss runs through pellets the fastest no question it's obviously heating up a larger amount of space and so therefore it needs the most pellets what was interesting to me is that the Trager tailgater actually used almost use pellets almost as fast as the Camp Chef and the Z grills the Green Mountain grills was some more in between which again makes sense it's actually a fairly tall fairly large amount of area that is or a volume that's being heated and then the pit-boss used about two and a quarter pounds per hour this was at 350 degrees Fahrenheit now again because I'm not super trusting of numbers provided to me marketing numbers that are provided to me I wanted to see exactly how much each of these grilles can hold and so I weighed how many pellets went into each one of these grilles and you can see the numbers here I was impressed that the numbers are reasonably close like really close to the marketing numbers so I'll actually give them a little pat on the back good job not over selling the hopper capacity of your grilles now when you take into account how big the hoppers are and how many pellets they actually hold we find that the pit-boss austin excel is able to run for thirteen and a half hours before refilling now that actually comes in second place to the Z grills zpg 700d all of the other grills they're not even close the Camp Chef can run for ten hours and I think that any of those three is reasonable I mean there aren't a lot of things I'm smoking that are gonna take longer than ten hours a few but not many and because of that I'm pretty happy with any of those three now the tailgater being what it is being designed to be a very mobile pellet grill I understand why it can only run for about four and a half hours without refilling that's probably fine if you're buying a grill for that specific purpose getting my chicken ready for the smoker now you've heard of orange chicken maybe but once it's just one color wait till you taste the whole rainbow yummy a couple other things I want to point out about some of these grills and and some of the reasons why I like some for specific reasons over others first of all mobility the Austin XL from pit boss is massive and it's also very heavy and so moving that thing around seems like it could be a pain but what I like is that pit boss has gone with two large rubber wheels and then two small swivel wheels I like the swivel wheels because it makes it very maneuverable and I can just push it around without having to lift one side up I'm not a wimp it's just easier to move things around that way especially if I like to store this up against the house and then pull it out when I'm going to use it because I don't want to smoke right up against the wall of my house some of the other grills have the same type of wheels the green mountain growth has the same the the Z grills provides me with four swivel wheels two of which are locking I kind of like the four swivel wheels for that same reason I can easily just pull it straight out from my house but it's not great if I want if I need to wheel it around very far if I'm gonna go over any sort of a bump those little swivel wheels just don't do that great the trigger tailgater has foldable legs now they're not as easy to fold as they might want you to believe but they are foldable which makes it easy to throw it in the back of a tailgate only two of the legs have wheels on them which is fine considering just how small it is it's actually not very hard to just grab it on the two sides and pick it up the Camp Chef only has two wheels they're reasonably sized they're not my favourite wheels of all of them for sure and then of course you have to pick up the other side and carry it around which is okay for most people especially if you're just keeping this thing in the backyard it's not that big of a deal but I like I like the big rubberized wheels they just make getting it around the yard or getting it around on the patio a little bit easier I love the concept of the ash clean out that the Camp Chef provides I wish everybody provided that same type of a clean out I think Camp Chef did a really good job going the extra mile there if the temperature numbers on the Camp Chef had held up and been even close to the others the Camp Chef would have been a real contender for the for me but in the end if the temperature cannot be consistent and we can't heat this thing up very fast it just can't win in my book if I want a small grill a good tailgater grill I'm probably not shelling out the 450 bucks that the triggers gonna cost most of these brands make a tailgater that's gonna cost substantially less and that like we've seen here are going to have similar if not better features than what triggers going to give you for the price other honorable mentions the Zee grills very solid grill I think it's just extremely light on features there's no clean outs of any kind there's no meat probes I mean it's a very consistent very solid grill because you probably gonna have to order it online you're going to have to set it up and set up can take a while likewise the Green Mountain grills Daniel Boone is a solid smoker if that's the one you've already got don't worry about returning it it's a really good one the simplicity in the control panel is great as long as you read the manual and understand how to work it so in the end after weeks of grueling testing hours of work smoking all sorts of different kinds of things I've got chickens on these right now I just have to say the pit-boss austin excel really as far as i'm concerned is the best smoker you can get for under $500 every one of these smokers is a very good smoker and certainly has its place and if you don't need the size of the Austin XL and you want to save a little bit more pit boss makes a smaller smaller grill and it only costs about 400 bucks if you want something that's maybe a step up from the pit boss no none of them here's a step up from the pit boss that's it for 500 bucks if it's me I'm going pit boss

Channel: Backfire 2

Views: 387,150

Keywords: Manliness, Men, Manly, Smoker, Pellet Grill, Traeger, Camp Chef DLX, Green Mountain Grills, Z Grills, Pit Boss, Austin XL, Daniel Boone, Traeger Tailgater

Id: 5f4hDUsrddk

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020