Pit Boss Pellet Grill - Year and Half In Depth Review

today I'm going to do an in-depth review on my pet boss pellet grill so I'll be going over how this grill operates the features that it has how to clean and maintain the grill and the things I do and don't like about this pellet grill so pellet grills have become real popular over the last few years and I think it's just because of how versatile they are you can grill in these you can bacon these you can smoke in these there's lots of different ways you can cook inside of a pellet grill and I've had this pellet grill now for a year and a half I've got a lot of cooking experience on it and I thought it was time that I should do a review we bought this pellet grill when we moved out here in our camper and we lived in our camper for a year while we were building this log home and during that time I cooked on in this pellet grill almost every day I had it right outside the camper this was my go-to thing to cook him and I did a lot of baking inside of this pellet grill because if you ever seen a you ever seen the the oven that's inside of a camper you're talking it's really small you only fit about a 12 inch pan in there and you just can't bake a lot in there so there's way more space inside of this pellet grill so I found myself always baking in this instead of trying to do do it inside the camper so I've got a lot of cooking experience on this grill so I'm really confident in in how it works and what I like and don't like about it so one thing I can't tell you about this grill is actually how hard it was to put together because my wife went and bought it at Academy Sports it was already put together and basically they just loaded it up in her car and she brought it home so I'm on the in the understanding that a lot of these will come in a box you'll have to put them together so I'm not sure how hard and how difficult that is even though pellet grills are very versatile you can cook on them in different ways I primarily think where it does the best is smoking I think that in my mind this is a smoker and that's what I think its primary uses is to smoke meat and that's how I use the pellet grill most of the time and I've owned three smokers I've owned three I've owned a master built I've owned a Bradley smoker and I've owned this pit boss and so far the pit boss is my favorite smoker so far the only bad thing about it is is you have to buy wood pellets to put in it so there is a cost involved having a pellet grill you are gonna have to continually buy wood pellets but this is my number one choice is the pit boss my number two choice is actually the masterbuilt I was very happy with my masterbuilt smoker and then I had a Bradley smoker never really was too satisfied with that you got to buy all those little biscuits from Bradley and then it broke all the time and finding replacement parts and stuff was a pain in the butt so the Bradley went to the bottom of the list I'd never buy another one so this pellet grill right here is a pit boss and it is a 820 Deluxe it may have a few features that some other ones don't have one thing it has on the side here is it has this it has this kind of like a serving tray it's got a bunch of holes in there and I really don't like this idea at all if I'm gonna put food on here it's going to be greasy it'll be dripping grease through the holes so I don't use this as a serving tray I just use it as a shelf so I keep my seasonings and some of my grill tools and stuff over here on that and now there's a little bar here on the side that holds that serving tray there is some pegs on it where you can hang some tools and with that bar this bar itself is you don't want to try to move the grill using this bar on this side because it's not that strong and it will Bend so you don't want to lift with that if you do need to move the grill you're gonna want to use the handle over here and on this side and that's how you move the grill so on this side over here we have the chimney and the little top hat on top this chimney is adjustable it's got a little bolt on top so you can kind of open and close that you can play around with that and that may help you maintain a steadier temperature on this side over here is the hopper and this hopper is where you put all your wood pellets that you're going to burn and the wood pellets come in all different kinds you can buy them in different types of wood you can buy an apple cherry Hickory mesquite you can buy all different types of wood chips or wood pellets I'm sorry and you fill your hopper with with those and this hopper I'm gonna say holds about ten pounds worth of pellets so it's about a half a 20-pound bag so on the on the front of the hopper you have your temperature selection and you can select what temperature that you want to cook at you can also select a smoke mode now smoke mode is just a way to to produce smoke and it kind of does a really low temperature about a 170 180 degrees one thing I don't like about the temperature selection is it's missing a few settings sometimes it skips 25 degrees sometimes it skips 50 so if you're doing some kind of baking and you're wanting to bake it like 375 you're not gonna find a selection for 375 on there you're either gonna have to pick 350 or 400 so not real happy with some of the temperature selections that are available on the front it'd be nice to have a couple more settings there so at the bottom of the grill it does have some nice steel wheels so you can roll it around on and it does have this bottom shelf I think the bottom shelf is just kind of a perfect spot so you can keep your extra wood pellets the front of the grill has this really wide nice door has a nice handle on it does have a regular temperature gauge on the front so when you open this up and look inside you're gonna see that there's actually three cast iron grates I'm a huge fan of cast iron and I love these grates there's three of them and that's that's so you can remove them and get inside here and clean now there is another great grill grate here on top and if you notice you've only got there maybe only four inches between that in the lower grades my personal opinion of this is that I don't like it and I just ended up taking it out so I ended up removing this grate I just went stored it I've never used this grill grate my opinion is this is just so they can say there's more square inches of cooking surface and it's more of a marketing ploy so my opinion is this little upper grate is pointless didn't need to be in there but I do love the cast iron grates in the bottom I know you're not going to be able to see what's under this grill grate really well we'll get into it later when we clean the grill but effectively under here is a heat shield and it's and it's got a dome shape to it that's slanting down hill so all your grease ends up going that way and it collects in a bucket down at the end so basically how this pellet grill works is you put wood pellets here on the in the hopper there's a little auger that moves it'll move all your little wood pellets and I'll move them into a burn pot in the middle and the middle bottom of your grill is this little burn pot and that's where all the wood pellets will be burning there's also a fan and the fan isn't you're going to always hear this fan blowing and that's really where a lot of the electrical use of this grill comes in is that fan is constant and it's just blowing air in there for combustion for that wood to burn now the pellet grill will also use electricity to to light the fire and get the wood pellets burning so what it has is it has this little bitty heating element in the burn pot in that fire pot and it will glow red and it will get those wood pellets burning now that little heating element will only get hot for the first few minutes when you first fire up your pellet grill it's only during the light off sequence that that heating element heats up we've got our hopper full of wood pellets so let's go ahead and light this off so by the book it says to start it off in the smoke mode but actually you can start it at any temperature you want so we can go ahead and just turn this up to 225 and it'll start out so you know it's in the startup sequence because there's three little dots on here that will flash if you can see those three little dots flashing but that means that it is heating up the heating element right now and trying to light it off and it will know that it's lit when the temperature comes up so when it sees that temperature above 200 degrees it's pretty much knows that it's got a fire so you can hear the fan running and it's trying to light that fan will be constant and you can hear the auger adding wood pellets and it's been about it's been about three minutes now and we're already starting to see smoke now during the light off sequence is where you're gonna see the most amount of smoke until that gets an actual flame burning it's gonna sit in there and smolder and you're gonna see a lot of smoke coming out of this pellet grill the smokes coming out pretty good now it's coming out from around the door it's coming out from the smokestack it's actually even coming out from where the oil pan is to where the oil drips down so it's got smoke coming out of everywhere right now so now we're about five minutes in you can see the smoke is actually starting to go away and you can hear a slight roar I don't know if you'll hear it on the video but there's actually a slight roar it's like there's a little jet engine in there you know as it's burning those flames and now the pit-boss is actually fully lit and running so now that the pellet grill is lit it's gonna slowly kind of come to a constant temperature you'll notice that it's still smoking at this lower temperature it will still have quite a bit of smoke right where you're going to smoke at so you're gonna see a lot of smoke at these lower temperatures but the higher and temperature you get the less smoke there is so say I set this at 350 400 degrees to bake in you may not hardly see any smoke out of this grill because it's burning so hot it actually isn't really making much smoke well I have a lot of people actually asked me when I bacon it does it taste smoky you know if I bake biscuits or brownies or something in this does it taste smoky and the answers that I say is no it doesn't because when you get to that higher temperature one it cooks so fast that they can't get that smoky taste and two is that it actually doesn't make much smoke at those higher temperature so one thing I will say about baking in the pellet grill when you use those higher temperatures you're going to go through wood chips wood pellets way quicker so I swear I feel like this is primarily best used for smoking if you set this at 225 you'll get about 12 hours out of the whole hopper of wood pellets so if you start this pellet grill up on smoke setting or one of the lower temperature settings it's going to over shoot it on temperature quite a bit so this thing got up to about 325 degrees after it lid off and now it's trying to slowly work its way down on temperature so that's going to take a little while if you're trying to smoke on this thing so that's something to keep in mind you'll probably be about 20 minutes before this things kind of gets all the way back down to 225 degrees so that it's ready to smoke up so once the pellet grill comes up to temperature you're ready to cook on you basically can just open up the door go ahead and load it up put your food in there and let it cook and it's pretty much hands-free from that point the only thing you got to do is just make sure that it's still got wood pellets in the hopper and if you're not cooking for multiple hours you probably don't have anything to worry about so after you're done cooking your food you just take your temperature knob you turn that down to off now you turn that off and it's still got it still got the sound of the fan now that's normal it's going to keep that fan running and it's going to make sure that all the wood in that burn pot it gets all burned up and it helps cool the grill down so this is going to keep on blowing this fan until the grill comes down on temperature so that's normal so the downfall of a pellet grill is that you actually need to clean it now I'm not talking about the grill grates of course you're gonna clean those every time you cook on it no I'm talking about we're gonna take it apart we're gonna get down inside of it and we're going to clean it so to do that you're gonna want some gloves you're gonna want some type of a scraper putting up our putty knife and then you're gonna want a vacuum and yeah I said a vacuum because the inside is gonna burn all that wood it creates a bunch of ash so you're gonna need to vacuum all that wood ash out of the bottom of this pellet grill but we're going to go ahead we are going to go ahead and get this disassembled and I'll show you what the inside looks like all right so first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take these grill grates out I've got some really nasty old tongs just for doing that so we're gonna pull that one out get these all out here now when I take these out you're gonna see this heat shield that's underneath here now one feature I couldn't show you earlier is that you can actually kind of like Charbroil in this too so this this middle section there's a middle section here and it actually slides open and you're gonna see all these slits in there that's right over the fire pot and flames will actually come out of out of there and you can actually kind of char your meat or your burgers so that's another way of cooking no like bad thing about that is it's got this little bit where you can slide and open that up so you actually have to take your grill grate off to be able to move positions on this back but that is another feature that's not on all pellet grills but it is on this one so you can see that's heat shield in here you can see you see all the black this is from the grease and all the drippings so this thing's super dirty that's what you're gonna use your scraper on your scraper is primarily there's gonna be to clean this heat shield now the rest of this heat shields really easy it's got two little tabs right here that slides over and I just sets down in there so you just got to get a hold of the sides just lift it if I can get it out figure just comes right out so once we've got the heat shield off you can actually see the the burn pot that's the fire pot right there where all the wood pellets get augered into and burn and down here it's just all covered up and ash so if you look down in here you can see just how much ash is built up all around the fire pot and then down around it now this will cause two different problems so one problem is is this ash since there's a fan in here blowing the ash if you get enough of it it'll eventually start wanting to blow around and it can actually blow around your heat shield and get a little bit of ash up on top of your food the second problem is getting too much ash down in this fire pot because if it covers up the heating element that lights your fire you won't get your fire lit and then it won't want to light off so you need to get that this fire pot and get all the ash vacuumed out of that or you'll have trouble lighting it [Music] [Applause] [Music] so now that it's all cleaned out you can actually see the little auger tube right here and then actually like right in front of it that little piece that sticks out looks like a little round piece that's sticking out like a that is the heating element that actually likes the wood pellets so now we're clean we're just gonna go ahead put it back together put our heat shield in here all we got to do is just make sure that it goes over these two tabs there it's easy to put in I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this closed because I don't normally use that Charbroil function we'll put her grates back in I typically put the bigger ones in first and I put that small one in the middle but I don't think it matters which way to put it in now I hope you can see focus over here so on this side of the grill over here this little probe sticking up that's the temperature probe and that's how it knows how to adjust the temperature of the grill is that little temperature probe right there so one last thing that we actually didn't go over is the smoke setting so there's a smoke setting on your temperature dial down here and it actually doesn't go off of temperature it actually goes off of time now when you first light your grill of course it will it will light and it'll go off a temperature to know that it's burning but then after that instead of using the temperature probe on the inside to adjust temperature it only adds wood pellets every so many seconds so it's based off a time now that is adjustable down in the next two your temperature you'll see a P and a number that is your P setting and that basically represents how many seconds that it will add wood pellets go there's a little button on the front it's a recessed button so you'll need like a pencil or something to press in on and you can adjust that piece setting and you can tweak it until it's runs at the temperature that you want it to run so you can actually get it where it's kind of down running about 170 or 180 degrees now the problem with the piece and there's two problems with piece setting one if you unplug it it'll go back to its default settings so if you think you had it set and you had a power outage or you had to unplug it you're gonna have to go back and read and set that piece setting every time the second problem is that it doesn't know that it's actually burning no more it's not going off a temperature it's going off of time so the problem that being if you get that set so low because it's kind of smoldering you know and if you get that so low that the fire goes out it doesn't know that and what happens is is it just keeps adding wood pellets every so many seconds like it thinks that it's running and you'll you're your grill will lose temperature it will get cold and the whole bottom side of the pellet grill will fill full of wood pellets it'll just keep augering all the wood pellets in there until your hoppers empty and it'll just keep it'll just keep trying to do that until you come and turn it off so the smoke setting can get you into trouble it's a setting that you just need to play with so that you know that you've got the right temperature and that you're maintaining that temperature and you're maintaining a burn and if you don't get that set right you get it set to low your fire could go out and put it but it won't know it so now at the beginning of the video I said that this was my favorite smoker so far and it is I really like cooking on the smoker I've had electric smokers in the past and you know they cook your meat and they can get it nice and smoky but this actually really actually burns wood it uses electricity to start the fire it uses it to add air to the combustion but it's truly burning wood so you actually get the pink ring on the meat you so if you cook like a big you know like a brisket or like a pork shoulder or something like that you're gonna have that pink ring on the inside because it's true burning wood and it's just it's just it's got a lot of great flavor it smokes of course it produces way more smoke than an electric smoker does in my opinion so it is just way better to smoke on I really enjoy it so things that I don't like is that I really like the vertical smokers for doing like smoked sausage like I make a lot of deer smoked sausage summer sausage and I won't be able to hang sausage in that so that's kind of a downfall but the vertical smoker also when you layer stuff drip grease drops down and it and the only the top one is the one that gets all the bark gets kind of a crust on it and then the rest of the stuff gets grease drippings on it and they don't really get that bark built up on there they kind of stay all moist on the outside so they this grill is perfect being horizontal that I can fit you know three pork butts in here and they all have that nice big bark formed on the outside and they're just / they're cooked perfectly so one of my other favorite things to cook in this is actually pizza so when you bake in this grill it has a cast iron grate in there that cast iron grate seems to get really hot and it's really easy to burn the bottoms of food in this pellet grill honestly it is so I would always elevate I would put like a basket in there or something I would elevate whatever I was baking get it up off that cast iron grate so that it wouldn't burn the bottoms bad but for pizza you want that nice crisp crust man this I love cooking pizza in this pellet grill and I and I do use a cast iron like griddle or skillet to cook my pizza in and you just get a super crisp crust in it it just does a really good job with pizza so I love for smoking I love it for pizza if you do want to bacon this I will say elevate it off that cast iron grate do something to help keep the bottom from burning if you're using like a roasting pan where it's got a lid you won't have any problems at all you can cook in it it'll keep that moisture in there and it'll cook just fine so one thing I didn't actually talk about too much was grilling you can use this for grilling you can cook your meat in there you can you can open that Charbroil function up and then you can kind of you know char that meat a little bit so it was kind of like it felt like it was in a grill if you don't use the charring function and will cook everything just fine you just aren't gonna have any char on there it will have a nice smoky flavor to it generally you'll you'll be able to tell that it was cooked with a little bit of wood but if I'm gonna actually grill as long as this takes to heat up and to get ready I just go straight to the Weber so I'll just I normally do my grilling on I got a weber propane grill and that's pretty much where I'll do my grilling cuz it's quick and easy but definitely go-to spot for smoking so I hope I remembered everything I want to talk about on this on this pellet grill I've been looking forward to doing a review on this for quite a long time and the reason I'm doing the review is because I really do like this pellet grill if I had one thing to choose out here out here outside our log cabin for me to cook on I have this pellet grill I have a weber gas grill and then I have a camp chef stove and if I was to just pick one thing I would pick this pit-boss pellet grill cuz this is my favorite thing to cook on outside so I hope you enjoyed the video I had a bunch of information I threw at you all but I really do enjoy this pellet grill so I do appreciate you guys watching and I'll see you guys in the next video well I almost forgot one key feature some people might be interested in it does have a bottle opener I gotta admit that it's kind of smoky back here I'm gonna smell like smoke the rest whoo Wow okay they like closing this thing get rid of the smoke we eat a breeze we need a breeze here people whose broken [Music]

Channel: Country View Acres

Views: 501,174

Rating: 4.8390064 out of 5

Keywords: smoke, smoker, pit boss, pellet grill, grill, wood, bake, heat, burn, cook, trager, apple, hickory, horizontal, vertical, cast, iron, temperature, automatic, control, fire, pit, boss, pellet, outdoor, grate, broil, sear, charbroil, roast, ribs, baby, back, chicken, pork, butt, loin, shoulder, brisket, jerky

Id: bPx5ApDiioQ

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 25 2018