Man Who Wears T S.
Good Cooking, Bad Repair
The cooking process is good. This is obviously different than a gas grill, but there is a lot of versatility. A bit of a learning curve, but the food turns out as good as the chef making it. My gripe relates to changing the starter. Changing the little box is not too bad, but changing out the wires involves a near-complete disassembly of the grill. It's as though they made it intentionally difficult to change the box and the ignition wires. The first thing you have to do is disconnect the tank and move it out of the way so the shelf drops down. After you drop the shelf, you have to completely remove the shelf from each side. After you do that, you have to pull off the burner knobs and then remove the brackets that hold the knobs in place. Only after that can you take off the faceplate and actually access the starter box and the wires. But even before I got that far, I found that the pieces that are mounted next to the burner are very difficult to remove. The screw and nut that holds them in place are very close to the ceramic piece on the starter, and you cannot easily get to them with a screwdriver or a box wrench. You have to hold the nut with a pair of needle nose pliers and then work with a screwdriver that is really close to the burner. I did not want to bump or dislodge the burner, so that was very difficult. But even then, the screw and nut were rusted, and they simply froze in place. There was not enough room to really turn the screwdriver, and 2 of the screws stripped in the process. The only way to remove them would have been with a hacksaw. Again, I did not want to damage the burner tubes or displace them. So before I got any further on the process, I looked on Amazon and found extra long fire starters of various types. You know - those butane lighters with the long tube. I bought those instead so I can simply light the grill by hand. I removed what I could of the starter assembly, cut the cables, and pulled a lot of that hardware out. Into the trash it went. One nice thing about this grill is that the burners do not clog because no food falls down onto them. Thus, I am going to light the burners on the outside with a handheld lighter and then just turn on the 2 burners in the middle. Once enough gas flows, they will light. Not ideal, but spending $20 for long lighters beats the heck out of a 3 – 4 hour project with endless frustration. This really should have been thought through a little better. The cooktop will obviously outlast all of us. The burners will not clog because no grease is raining down on them. But the starter is a part that needs to be replaced regularly. It is known to fail based on the mechanical nature of it. No problem there; the replacement kit was about $20. But actually getting to the starter box and connecting up the wires was extremely difficult. Far worse than it had to be. So difficult, I opted for a different approach. They need to go back to the drawing board to simplify the design.