So I was recently walking through my local home improvement store and stopped to look at the grills. Not that I need a new grill or another grill for that matter I just like to see what’s out there. I noticed there was a few pellet grills and smokers among the gas and charcoal grills. That’s kind of cool I thought to myself I haven’t seen one before. So, of course, I had to go home and learn all I could about them. My main question was are they better then gas and charcoal.
What I learned is pellet grills use indirect heat to cook so it can be hard to get a good sear on a piece of meat. You do get the good smoke flavor out of the pellets and they come in all different types of wood so they are good for smoking. The only thing I don’t like is that they work like a pellet stove for your house and turn off if you don’t need the heat so you won’t get a continuous flow of smoke once it’s up to temperature.
So that left me wondering if there a cheaper option for grilling besides gas or charcoal. I also wanted to know how the pellets would affect the flavor of my food other than adding a smoky flavor to it. I mean what exactly holds the pellet together, is there any other chemicals in them.
Also, I wondered how they worked in general I know people heat there houses with pellet stoves but I didn’t really know how they worked. So here’s everything I learned about pellet grills and my break down of what the best fuel is for grilling and why.
How Pellet Grills Work
Like I said above pellet grills work a lot like pellet stoves for home heating. There’s a hopper on the side that you fill with pellets. At the bottom of the hopper, there’s an auger that feeds the pellets into a firepot. Once there in the firepot, a hot rod igniter lights them on fire while a combustion fan blows air across them to stoke the flames and keep it going.
This makes the grill more like a convection oven with the hot air blowing around the food and cooking it on all sides. At the bottom of the grill, there’s a grease dome that sends all the grease that drips off the food to a grease bucket. The grease dome also keeps any open flames from getting to your food in the cooking chamber.
This setup is nice for temperature control. Pellet grills can be very precise with there temperature using a digital controller. Most will even come with a meat probe that can be connected to the temperature readout so you can monitor the internal temperature of the meat.
The downside of this set up is that it can be hard to get a good sear on a piece of meat. Some grills now have sear zones to help with this.
Cost Of Grilling
| Fuel | Cost Of Fuel For 1HR Cooking | Cost Range Of The Grill | Can It Be Used As A Smoker | Heat Control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pellet | 1$ | 350$ – 600$ | Yes | Digital |
| Gas | 1.26$ | 200$ – 400$ | No | Gas Valve |
| Charcoal | 1$ | 50$ – 300$ | Yes | Air Vents |
Pellet
So let’s do a cost break down of these three fuel types and see who is cheaper. A 20 Lb bag of pellets will cost you around 10$, which may change depending on where you live I’m just looking at the cost in my area.
So the next question is how many grilling sessions will you get from a 20 Lb bag. Will that all depends on what temperature you’re going to be cooking at. If you’re doing low and slow cooking you might go through a pound an hour. If your cooking at higher temperature then it might be 3 Lb an hour.
So let’s go in the middle and say you’re going to be cooking over Medium heat and call it 2 Lb an hour. Let’s also say with letting the grill heat up and doing all your grilling your going to have the grill going for about one hour.
Pellet grills heat up fast so that should be plenty of time to get all your cooking done. So now we can say that one 20 Lb bag will give you 10 grilling sessions. At a cost of 10$ for a bag of pellets that means one grilling session is going to cost you around 1$ worth of pellets. That doesn’t sound so bad but let’s see how it compares to our two other fuel types.
Gas
So when I say gas I’m talking about propane I don’t live in an area where I can get natural gas. So I’m basing my point of view on using a 20 Lb propane tank and exchanging it at a local gas station.
I know some of you have the option to get your grill hooked up to your house’s natural gas line and it might work out cheaper. I’ll give you as much information as I can to help you figure out what it’s costing you. But my number will be based on using a propane tank.
So the first thing I think you need to know is that propane is a liquid when it’s in the tank and turns into gas on the way out. Even though the tank holds 20 Lb you don’t get the whole 20 Lb out of it there’s always some left in the tank.
In some cases, there can be up to 3 Lb still in the tank and your grill won’t light. This is because the liquid propane in the tank is to low, and you’re not building up gas pressure within the tank. When your tank is all most empty there’s too much of a void for it to make gas pressure fast enough to keep your grill lit.
You see where the grill connects to your tank there’s a regulator to control how much pressure gets to your grill. If it gets too low or too high it will close and not let anything out. Sorry for that little rant. Now let’s look at the cost, it cost me 24$ to exchange my propane tank and most grills are going to use just under a 1 LB an hour. So my test I got 19 grilling sessions out of one tank. That’s going to give me a cost of 1.26$ per a grilling session.
Charcoal
So when it comes to charcoal most of the time you have two options. There’s lump charcoal or charcoal briquettes. There are lots of types of charcoal but not all are easy to come by. Mostly when you go to the store your going to see Lump charcoal or charcoal briquettes.
Basically, Lump still looks like wood and briquettes are nice little squares made from sawdust. If you want to learn more about charcoal you can click here to read my article on it. I’m going to use charcoal briquettes for my example all though lump is close to the same cost
Like the other two fuel options, charcoal briquettes come in a 20 Lb bag and it will cost you about 10$ a bag. Now I use a chimney starter to light my charcoal and it holds about 2Lb at a time. Most grilling sessions I’ll only use one chimney starter worth of charcoal.
So I’ll get 10 grilling sessions out of one bag. That’s going to give me a cost of about 1$ per a grilling session. So less then propane but equal to pellet grill cost. But a little more work then a pellet grill sins you’ll have to light the charcoal and control the temperature yourself.
Where a pellet grill does both of those things by itself but it does need to be plugged into an outlet to do them. So really to know the true cost you would need to know how much electricity the pellet grill uses as well. I’m not going to dig into that sorry I’m just looking at fuel cost for now.
So there’s the pro and cons of all the fuel options even though pellet and charcoal cost the same one takes a little more effort to use where the other needs electricity from your home to work.
My thoughts on fuel cost
For me, charcoal is still the cheapest option for grilling. I know it takes more work and has a bit of a learning curve. But the fuel cost is the cheapest and the cost of the grills themselves is the cheapest.
It needs nothing else to run and the grill has almost nothing that can break on them. That said if I see a pellet grill on sale at the end of the summer I may get one just to try it out, or maybe I can talk one of my friends into buying one. But I’m not going to replace my charcoal grill with it even if I do get one I’d still want to have a charcoal grill as my main grill.
How Your Fuel Can Affect The Taste of Your Food
Pellet
So like I said above I don’t have a pellet grill. Not that I don’t want one, but I already have three charcoal grilles and couldn’t come up with a good excuse to buy a forth grill. That being said I was happy to find out one of my friends had bought one so I still got to try one out this summer. By the way, if I find a good sale on them at the end of summer I am going to buy one. This way I can master cooking on it next summer. Here’s what I’ve learned so far with the little time I’ve spent cooking on one.
When cooking with pellets whether it’s in a smoker or just a pellet grill your cooking with indirect heat. So you have an opportunity to add smoky flavor to your food as long as you use the right pellets.
Most food grade pellets are made from hardwood sawdust so they’ll naturally give off smoke that will add some flavor to your food. When shopping for pellets take a look and see what type of wood they’re made of. Most of the time you can find a Hickory or Apple Blend instead of just using hardwood pellets.
If you’re wondering about any other additives that might be in pellets you don’t have to worry. When I said pellets are made from sawdust I really mean just sawdust. What happens is the sawdust from lumber milling operations is put into an extruder.
The extruder compresses it under extremely high pressure and the pellets are pushed out of little holes on the front of the extruder. That’s why you need to make sure you use food-grade pellets otherwise there going to be made from a mix of all types of sawdust.
Propane
Propane is actually an odorless and tasteless gas when its made. What you smell is an additive that has been mix in to make it easy to know if you have a leak. If not for the additive you could have a leak and not know until there was a fire. That being said the additive should not affect the taste of your food as long as your grill is working properly.
If you do find that you’re getting an odd taste when using your gas grill then there’s most likely a problem with the grill. Most often the air to fuel mix is off and the gas isn’t burning hot enough to burn off the additive.
A good way to tell if this is the case is to look at the flame when the grill is lit. The flame should be all blue, if it’s yellow then there’s not enough air mixing with the gas. There a few things that can cause this to happen.
First, if you’re dealing with a new grill or you’ve had a problem sins you got the grill then the fuel-air mix may be set wrong. If this is the case for you then I would call the store you got it from and see if they will fix it for you or exchange it for another grill.
The second thing that can be happening is something is blocking the air intake and causing the fuel-air mix to be off. This happens with older grilles from time to time. Dirt may be blocking the air intake or bugs could have gotten it and made a nest in the air intake. Either way, a good cleaning should fix the problem. Make sure the burners are all clean and that nothing is blocking the air intake.
Charcoal
To me, there’s no other way to grill then with charcoal. I know its more work and it takes longer to get the grill heated up but there’s just something about grilling over charcoal. The smell of it in the air just makes it feel like summer to me. That feeling makes me want to be outside grilling so the extra time it takes just isn’t a factor to me. Also, there’s a flavor you get in food that’s been grilled over charcoal that you just can’t get with other grilles.
Like I talked about above charcoal comes most commonly in two ways, the most common is briquettes and in more recent times lump charcoal is becoming more common. Both are made from wood and both will add a little smoky flavor to food. I’m not going to go into a big how there made in this article. If you would like to learn more about how charcoal is made you can click here. You’ll also find out about some other types of charcoal from around the world.
Cost Of The Grill
So now let’s take a look at the cost of the grilles themselves. Like with all grills the price will change depending on the size of the grill and the brand so lets set some parameters for this comparison. The best way I can think of doing that is by going off the sq-in of the grills. So I looked at a lot of grills when I was at the store and found ones that are close to the same size.
Pellet Grilles Cost
Looking at pellet grilles at my local home improvement store and there around 500$. That’s kind of expensive for a grill in my opinion at least. But let’s look a the specs on it and see how it holds up to comparable gas and charcoal grilles. At first look, the grill says it has 820 sq-in of cooking space, that doesn’t sound too bad. But if you read the space sheet on it, it’s only 576 sq-in of primary cooking area the other 244 sq-in is just a big warming rack.
Now it does have digital controls for setting your temperature and a temperature probe that you can put in a larger piece of meat. That is kind of cool but for the price of the grill, I think it should have a few more upgraded features like that.
Gas Grilles Cost
I did some looking around at the same store and found a gas grill that was close to the same size at least in primary cooking sq-in. Now to be fair this grill has less total cooking sq-in it has a total of 755 sq-in but the primary cooking area is made up of 550 of them, and the warming rack is the remaining 205.
So when you look at it like that it’s not really that much smaller than the pellet grill we just looked at. The real big difference is the price of the grill. This grill is only 350$ that a good bit less than the pellet grill. Now it doesn’t have digital temperature control or a second temperature probe.
So it’s not as convenient to use as the pellet grill but for that kind of savings, you might not mind. It does have a temperature gauge on the lid so you still can see how hot the grill is. Also it has something I’ve only ever seen come on gas grilles and that’s a side burner.
Charcoal
Last but not least we have charcoal grills. So again I look for a grill that was close in size to make this a fair as I can. This time the grill I found had a total cooking area of 850 sq-in and the primary cooking area was made up of 580 of them. With the warming rack being made up of the remaining 270.
So this grill is bigger all the way around compared to the other two and it’s the cheapest at 140$. But if you look at grills you’ll see charcoal is always cheaper. That’s because there’s less to the grills. There’s really no parts just some doors and grates.
Let’s take a look at the specs on the grill now like I just said there’s not much to charcoal grills. So once again this grill doesn’t have the digital temperature control like the pellet grill. But it does have a temperature gauge in the lid just like the gas grill we looked at.
Really that’s about all for this grill it does have the ability to have a side firebox added to it. So that you can use it as a smoker. But that doesn’t come with it you would need to buy it separately on this grill. Some other grills came with it already on the grill but the upfront cost is a bit more. I found one at the store with a side firebox for 170$ so still the cheapest.
Conclusion
So there you have it if you want a grill that will just about run itself then I would say go with the pellet grill. There’s not much you’ll need to do just add your pellets to the hopper and set your temperature on the digital control and wait for your food to be done. Shore you’re going to spend a lot more for the grill. But you won’t have to stand at the grill watching the temperature when you have a cookout.
That sounds a lot like cooking in an oven to me just with some smoky flavor added to the food. Now if you’re not looking to spend a lot of money on a grill, and you enjoy cooking then you should get a charcoal grill. It will take you a bit longer to get the grill going with having to light the charcoal. But it’s going to be worth it, in the end, you’ll have spent less and I feel you get better tasting food.
Or you can go in the middle and get yourself a gas grill. They’re not really that bad and really any grill is better than not grilling in the summer. If it helps get you and your kids outside and the kids off their device. Then you’ll have the opportunity to make some great memories of having summer cookouts.
As Always, Happy Grilling!