Z GRILLS Wood Pellet Grill 8-in-1 Smoker

Warning long review in 2 parts. Assembly and then cooking results. Hope you enjoy it and learn from it. Last month a tragedy happened at my house. My old pit boss pellet smoker that has provided many mouth watering meals to the neighborhood croaked. Several ppl found out and we ended up giving it a Viking funeral complete with fire chips in the pellet feeder and pit blazing away. Of course after the beer bottles were put away the question was asked ‘what are you going to do now?’ Frankly I had no idea! The answer turned out to be read a lot of reviews, visit several stores, ponder over the wisdom of Wi-Fi and smoking. Finally I settled on this smoker. I love manual controls and the two temp probes are a must. My old smoker was sadly inaccurate temp wise and caused me to have to make many on the fly decisions based on backup temp gauges and such. Thus was the art of smoking and I adjusted and got very good at it. My goal with this smoker was accurate temp control wise and a large enough pellet feeder to get some sleep when cooking all night briskets for new years. This year I plan to be awake for the game not sleeping in a chair lol. On Friday this big old box was delivered and Saturday a team of friends came to help assemble this monster. Since I’d been injured in an accident the help was quite required as it’s a bit unwieldy to assemble. We laughed and giggled our way through construction till we reached the pellet box assembly. Here our previously simple instructions let use down a bit. While attaching the top box section a nut slipped and fell into the screw housing and refused to come out. After disassembling the control panel and box top we reached and extracted the nut covered the hole with a tissue and tried to reassemble. (After assembly we burned out the tissue) The control panel would not reattach however due to the tap screws widening the hole. During this fix I noticed the control panel cover was not attached fully in a way that could allow moisture into the control electronics. This is bad in a humid place like Florida. After locating the correct size bolts and nuts in my workshop i attached the control panel again and the used all weather caulking to seal it in place. The rest of assembly went off without a hitch. The installation instructions are the best I’ve ever used for a smoker and the whole job took a leisurely 3 hours. Once wheeled into position in the yard I ran through all the priming tests and break in heating so far everything is proceeding as planed the temp is right on and it does in fact reach 450 degree though after testing I’ll never do it again lol. It produces wonderful amounts on smoke on the smoke setting as ran about 160 degrees while smoking. I’m letting the caulk cure before fully filling the large pellet box and cooking pulled pork this weekend and a couple of racks of ribs. Will update the experience soon. Some great hidden features I found were the simple access to the fire box for cleaning. The old smoker was very hard and messy. This one has plenty of clearance for everything you need to remove, grills drip tray and burner cover all remove quick and easy. I certain I could even do it with oven mits on in an emergency. The drip tray is nicely designed to hold a18 inch shell of aluminum foil for easy clean up too. These simple improvements would have made several previous smokes much easier. Can’t wait to put it to the real test this Friday Part 2 weather 80 to 64 degree 0 to 5mph wind during 12 hours cook After a few days of letting the caulk dry I dumped 20lbs of applewood pellets in the smoker ran through the startup process placed a old pork shoulder I found at the bottom of my meat freezer into the smoker. I freely admit struggling with pull pork smokes in the past. Largely cause it’s not my kinda meal and previous smokers temp control was to inaccurate to predict finish times. I started this with the idea this 5lbs hunk of meat would largely go to the dogs as is our tradition with first smokes for the last 5 smokers. That said I learned several useful thing during the cook. 1 the temp is rock solid. I set it at 225 and walked away with the fan blowing hard. After a while it slows down and maintains very good control measured with external Bluetooth probe and the cookers probe for the entire cook both consistently agreed it was within 5 degrees 2 the fan adjusts quickly when you open the hood to keep the temp. Really like this feature as I like to spray briskets and such. If only opened for a minute or so it held the temp within 5 degrees of target. 3 there is a pass through for probes that allows the wires to enter the grill without allowing cracks to let in air and affect airflow over the meat. Nice feature. 4 minimal excess smoke. This surprised me and made me believe my flavors would be affected. Only gentle puffs of smoke were emitted every five minutes or so. Results. I was stunned by how good the cook came off. The meat was moist and throughly cooked, smoke rings extended almost a full centimeter into the meat giving the crust an excellent flavor. Hell I ate the missing section from the photo lol. Despite being an old frozen cut of meat this smoker made it be all I believe it could be. While the dogs got the traditional first piece. We ate the rest! Clean up: here is where this smoker shined the most. The next morning I came out with my handheld vacuum to clean it. After 12 full hours of smoking I had about 5lbs of pellets left in the feeder. No refills were required. In 5 minutes I had it grills drip tray and burner cover off and cleaned. Vacuumed out the burner can and replaced all the parts. Almost no grease on my hands and nothing on my clothes. Cook 3 cold weather 50 to 58 degrees 10 mph wind misting off and on. I cooked a pair of baby back rib racks and baked potatoes for a thanksgiving eve meal in challenging weather. The smoker did very well for the conditions especially since I needed to open it several times to wrap and rotate foods. The temp did struggle a bit on 225 with the real temp about 15 degrees lower than the smoker suggested it was. Mostly I suspect due to wind, I had to turn the smoker to 250 for the last two hours to get the meal finished right. FYI I was told by the families who got the food it was perfect and they can be hard graders. I continue to love this purchase. In short this is the best smoker I’ve ever bought and I’ve had two electric uprights, 1 wood offset, and 2 pellet grills. 5 stars. I hope this helps you all. Puppy dog story if you care: on my very first ever smoke I tried to do a similar sized pork shoulder on a cheap little smoker I found at a garage sale. I finish a night of sitting up and filling the wood box and worked really hard. That morning I came out with tin foil pan pulled the meat and promptly dropped it on the ground where it burst into serval large police’s in the dirt. The dogs got the whole thing. As I got new smokers we decided to keep the tradition going kinda like the angels share of a whiskey barrel. We always get surprises anyway on that first cook and it sorta became a thing.