What is a Pellet Grill & How Does It Work?

Jun 26, 2024 • Jerry Crespo

While pellet grills have been around for decades, their popularity has recently skyrocketed. In the last few years, pellet grills have entered the mainstream.

At All Things Barbecue, we receive many questions from customers and people who are intrigued by pellet grills, how they work, and what makes them special. Whether you’re a prospective pellet grill owner or just want to learn more, here’s everything you need to know about them:

A Yoder Smoker Pellet Grill full of food

Pellet Grill Basics & Why They’ve Become So Popular

When it comes to grills, charcoal, gas, and pellet-fueled options are the most common. Charcoal and propane grills have long been popular choices for backyard cookouts, but each comes with its own set of drawbacks. Pellet grills offer the superior flavor of an offset smoker combined with the ease of use provided by gas grills, making them a versatile and convenient choice for outdoor cooking.

Pellet grills are outdoor cookers fueled by compressed wood pellets to grill and smoke food. Most also come with precise digital temperature control.

So, why use them?

While different types of grills all have their pros and cons, there are good reasons why pellet grills have become so popular in recent years. These include:

• Versatility: On a pellet grill, you can grill, barbecue, smoke, roast, bake, and even braise all in one.

• Automated temperature control: This makes it simple to maintain consistent cooking temperatures.

• Flavor: Wood pellets add a hint of smoke flavors to your food. Hickory, cherry, and apple are popular options.

• Ease of cleaning: They produce less ash than charcoal grills and are easier to clean.

• Sustainability: Wood pellets are a more sustainable fuel than gas and burn cleaner than charcoal. They are also more energy-efficient, consuming less fuel per cook.

Now, with those being the basic upsides to a pellet grill, here’s how they work:

How Pellet Grills Work

Pellet grills are made up of the following parts: the hopper (where the wood pellets are stored), the firepot (the bowl where the pellets ignite), the auger (the screw-like device that moves pellets from the hopper to the firepot), the ignition rod (starts the fire in the firepot), and fans (provides combustion and carries the heat and smoke through the cooking chamber).

A Pellet Grill and all of its parts labeled

These components work together in four general steps: starting the grill, heating up, cooking, and maintaining set temperature.

First, the hardwood pellets are loaded into the hopper. When the grill is started, the auger is activated and begins feeding pellets from the hopper into the firepot. There, an ignition rod heats the pellets, and the fan (or fans, depending on your model) forces air across them, providing oxygen for ignition.

Once the pellets have ignited, the ignition rod shuts off and the grills controller manages the pellet feed rate required to maintain the set temperature. The fans run continually to deliver a clean fire that results in a thin blue smoke profile, delivering the heat and smoke through the cooking chamber.

Lastly, the pellet grill controller allows for adjustments to be made during the cook and maintains the set temperature. Unlike standard gas or charcoal grills, wood pellet grills measure their interior temperature and adjust the speed at which pellets are fed into the firepot to maintain the desired temperature.

What is Wood Pellet Fuel?

Wood pellets are small, cylindrical pieces made of compressed wood. They are generally made from wood waste like sawmill drops, orchard pruning, sawdust, and more, which is then dried, pulverized and finally compressed through dies to form their shape under high pressure. Unlike other industrial pressurized woods, cooking pellets don’t use any chemicals; instead, the wood’s naturally occurring lignin acts as the binder when compressed.

Performance

Obviously, what any griller really wants is great performance. This is where pellet fuel really shines. The clean sourcing of wood used to make cooking pellets along with the low moisture content produces a hotter, cleaner and more efficient fire than regular wood. Combine these characteristics with an intelligent temperature control systems like the ACS controller on the Yoder Smoker pellet grills, you get precise temperature management and a consistent thin smoke from 150 to 350-degrees, imparting that perfect hint of smoke to your food.

Cooking Wood Pellets

There are two main grades of wood pellets, distinguished primarily by the amount of ash they produce and their BTU production: premium and standard.

• Premium grade pellets are 100% hardwood or a high-quality blend of hardwood with a bit of softwood, typically fruitwood. These pellets produce very low levels of ash—typically less than 1%.
• Standard grade pellets contain a higher percentage of softwoods and can include some bark and other organic materials. They produce slightly more ash than premium pellets—usually around 1-2%—but still work well for most purposes.

It’s best to stick with pellets that are hardwood based, this base is typically oak, as its density produces high BTU’s and a mild smoke flavor. This mild flavor is conducive to the addition of hickory, pecan or fruitwoods, when those flavors are desired.

The Pellet Grill Control System

The original pellet grills didn’t have automatically adjusting augers to constantly achieve a target temperature. Instead, they fed pellets into the firepot at a consistent rate, with their speeds being manually adjustable to burn higher or lower. Today, however, most pellet grills feature digitally adjusting heat controllers.

Pellet grills, such as the Yoder Smokers YS640S, utilize automatic control systems that read grill temperatures via a thermocouple and relay that information to a control system. This system then adjusts the pellet feed rate to control the grill’s temperature, creating a precise cooking environment.

The most advanced modern pellet grills offer additional features like WiFi/Bluetooth control, multi-food probe monitoring, and real-time temperature monitoring with accompanying apps.

These capabilities underline the purpose of pellet grills since they first appeared: to offer convenience without sacrificing quality, and quality without sacrificing convenience. If you’re a grilling enthusiast, the control and precision you have at your fingertips is life changing.

All in all, pellet grills are a fantastic example of humans using digital technology to enhance the capabilities of analog tools. This advancement goes beyond merely making cooking easier; it genuinely improves our quality of life.

After all, considering the significant percentage of our lives spent cooking or eating, second perhaps only to sleeping, shouldn’t that process be rewarding, pleasurable, and mentally and physically beneficial?

In other words: Cooking and eating are fun — pellet grills help make both even better! If you’re interested in learning even more about pellet grills, see their history below:

History of Pellet Grills

A Brief History of Pellet Grills

The process of binding together lumber mill waste into usable fuel is not new. In fact, it was in the early 1930s that Robert Bowling, a researcher at the Potlatch Lumber Mill in Potlatch, Idaho created the process for binding sawdust and other green waste from the mill into Pres-to-logs.

Robert T. "Bob" Bowling

These logs were roughly thirteen inches long and four inches in diameter, and burned more consistently, and for longer, than traditional logs in wood stoves and furnaces. Over the years other mills and companies got in on the act and today you can buy pressed logs, which can be organic or synthetic depending on the product, at just about any home improvement store.

During the 1970s oil crisis the need for a new fuel source for heating homes was realized and biomass engineers began experimenting with this new smaller pellet technology. Jerry Whitfield, an engineer with Boeing in Washington state, learned about wood pellets while in Europe and began experimenting with pellets as a fuel source for a new stove for his home.

Dr. Jerry Whitfield

This stove had the look of a traditional wood stove but utilized an auger to feed the pellets to the burn area and a fan to help it burn evenly with as little smoke emissions as possible. By 1984 Whitfield had launched his pellet stove under the name Whitfield Pellet Stoves (which was later sold to Lennox Hearth Products).

Whitfield’s stoves became a popular way of heating homes in areas where traditional stove heating had been used since these wood pellets were cheaper, and more efficient, than buying and burning through cords of split wood. Three years after Whitfield launched his pellet stoves the Traeger Grill company. Founded by a family that owned a heating company in Oregon, utilized the same fan and auger system found in Whitfield’s stoves to create the first commercially available pellet grills.