Gas Grills

Burner tubes run under the grate and carry gas from a 20 pound propane tank or a house line, with a knob metering the flow. Control is the entire product here, since heat arrives in about ten minutes and stops the instant you shut the valve.

Metal bars or plates sit between the burners and the food, catching drippings and vaporizing them back up as smoke. Here, a gas grill gets what flavor it has. Two burners is the working minimum, because lighting one and leaving the other cold builds the indirect zone that anything thicker than an inch needs. Read output as a ratio rather than a headline: 80 to 100 BTU per hour for each square inch of primary grate covers home cooking, so a 450 square inch grill wants around 40,000 and gains nothing useful from 60,000.

Charcoal grills beat this on flavor and charge you a half hour of chimney time. Pellet grills hold 225 degrees far more steadily and cannot sear as hard. Flat top griddles run the same burners under a solid steel plate, winning on eggs and smash burgers and giving up grill marks and drainage completely.

Grilling most weeknights is where gas earns its price, because nothing else puts dinner out in twenty minutes from cold. A natural gas line ends tank runs for good and pins the grill inside hose reach, usually 10 to 12 feet from the outlet, so settle that before a plumber comes. Buy something else if smoke is the reason you want a grill at all, since fat sizzling on hot metal produces a fraction of what burning wood does.

More parts fail on a gas grill than on any charcoal one: igniters, regulators, hoses and burners all wear. Test the stainless with a magnet, which slides off the 304 grade that lasts and grips the 430 grade that rusts at the welds. Each spring, look through the burner tubes for spider webs, which block the air opening, push the flame back toward the valve and start fires behind the control panel, then brush soapy water over every fitting and watch for bubbles.