At 10:14 Saturday morning, Matt texted me a photo from a driveway in Richardson: a Pit Boss pellet grill with a sun-faded lid and a man in a ball cap holding an extension cord. "$240. Runs. Thoughts?" I wrote back "Check the firepot." He sent a thumbs-up and a second photo of the inside, which is about as close to a date as we get during baseball season.
Matt has had an Oklahoma Joe's offset smoker since 2019 and a Weber kettle even longer. The offset makes the best brisket I've ever eaten, but it needs someone feeding the fire every 45 minutes for twelve hours. With Wyatt's games starting this month and Easter coming, Matt wanted something he could set and walk away from. New pellet grills the size he wanted cost more than twice what he was willing to spend, so he'd been watching Facebook Marketplace since January.
What we checked before paying
The seller was moving into an apartment and couldn't take it, which is the best reason to sell a grill, since it usually means nothing's wrong with it. Still, Matt went down a list we'd written out the night before:
- Power. The seller had it plugged in at his garage outlet. The controller lit up and the fan kicked on right away.
- Igniter. Matt set it to smoke, lifted the grates and heat shield, and watched the igniter rod glow orange within a couple of minutes.
- Auger. With the hopper lid open, he could hear and see pellets feeding into the tube. No grinding, no stalling.
- Firepot. This is the part that rusts through on older grills. Some surface rust, no holes, nothing flaking when he scraped it with a key.
- Body and legs. Paint bubbling on the lid, which is cosmetic. Legs solid, wheels rolling, grease bucket present.
- Grates. Badly rusted. That was the one thing he knew he'd replace, and he used it to talk the price down from $275.
He paid $240 cash, loaded it into the F-150 with the seller's help, and stopped on the way home for a new grate and a cover, $46 together. All in, $286. Pellets run about $18 for a 40-pound bag.
The first weekend
Saturday afternoon was cleanup. The hopper still held a few pounds of old pellets that had soaked up moisture and swelled into something like wet sawdust, so Matt vacuumed those out with the shop vac, along with a winter's worth of ash from the firepot. Then he ran the grill empty at 350 for about 40 minutes to burn off whatever the last owner had cooked. The whole backyard smelled like a campfire and somebody else's ribs.
Sunday, while I did the Sunday reset at the kitchen table, he smoked six pounds of bone-in chicken thighs at 250 for about an hour and a half, then turned it up to 375 to crisp the skin. I checked them with the Thermapen he gave me for Christmas, and they were juicy, evenly cooked and lightly smoky. The thighs cost $9.30 at Aldi and covered dinner for five plus two days of lunches. We'd also lost an hour to daylight saving time that morning, so dinner felt like it happened at 4:45.
So far, honestly
The good: it held temperature within about 10 degrees all afternoon, in a breeze, and Matt went inside twice to watch basketball. That was the entire point of buying it. The chicken used about 6 pounds of pellets, roughly $2.70 worth.
The less good: the smoke flavor is milder than what comes off the offset. Matt noticed right away and said so, twice. He wants to try a smoke tube on longer cooks, and the offset isn't going anywhere when brisket's on the menu. It also needs an outlet, so it lives by the one near the back door, and Rosie has already tried to unplug the extension cord running across the patio.
The biggest risk with a used pellet grill is the parts you can't see. If the controller or the auger motor dies, replacements aren't cheap, and there's no warranty from a guy in Richardson. We knew that going in and decided $240 was a fair bet. That was our call for our budget, not a rule for anybody else's.
The first real test is Easter. Matt wants to smoke a bone-in ham on it for nine of us on April 5. I've already logged it in the spreadsheet under kitchen gear, $286, with a note in the next column: "He promised."
