Grill Maintenance
I like grilling. I need to do it more often. I even live in a place where I could grill pretty much all year so I really don’t have any excuse. Well, except I was behind on keeping the grills up.
I’ve got two grills — a large one and a smaller infrared one. Both are propane — I know: a sin for a true griller — but I’m lazy. I like being able to walk out, light it up, and have it ready to cook in 5-10 minutes.
Both grills needed some attention. Igniters didn’t work, needed cleaning, etc. So a couple of weeks ago I sat down and figured out the parts I needed and disassembled and made them pretty damn good. Both needed igniter switches/modules, the smaller one needed a new grease pan and rails to hold it as it’d sat in just such a way to get water in there and rust. I think that was all of $12. Larger one had some rust on the pan under the grill that feed into the grease catcher so had to re-attach that.
By the way, a note about cleaning grill grates: You can use the chemical products or you can put them in a bathtub or large sink, get wet, cover with baking soda, and pour vinegar over them. Let them sit overnight. Come out pretty damn good.
Or…. Last year I’d bought new grates for the large one. I think they were $30? Let’s even say $50.
Anyway, where I was going with all of this is something I’ve seen lately that makes me scratch my head.
There are a couple of services in my area that clean grills. Steam or pressure wash or something. Just clean. They don’t repair the igniters or replace anything bent or broken or rusted out. Just clean the grill, which I’m assuming means polish the stainless and clean the grates. My large grill is like 10 years old, so it’s dirty. They say the grill will be “like new.” So I asked how much. They quoted me $350 for my large grill.
$350.
And I think that was with a coupon.
As I said, buying new grates was maybe $50. And — here’s the part I love — buying a whole new grill just like it is $299, cheaper than they want to clean my 10-year-old grill.
I’m not sure who’s paying for this grill cleaning, but I’ve got some swampland in Florida to sell them.
Also, a shout-out to the folks at Char-Broil for (a) making their model numbers easy to find and pretty resilient to age and (b) having a fairly easy-to-search parts area and keeping old parts around or showing what the replacement is if the original isn’t available any longer. There are a ton of other sites around that have replacement parts, too, but I can’t say any of them were really that much cheaper than Char-Broil.