do i gotta do this after every bbq? can i cook food and leave it uncleaned then bbq the next day and the next day? how often do i have to vac up the ash?
No you don’t have to do it every time. Depends on how long your cooks are. But if you don’t vacuum it out. Then the pot gets full and the smoke moves to your hopper.
How much you need to vacuum depends a lot on The pellets you use. Some woods make more ash than other woods, and some brands of the same would will make more ash than other brands. Also some woods will tend to kind of make a hard puck in the bottom of the firebox. This is because there's elements like silica in some types of wood and that silica can melt together and basically form glass. So you get like a glassy ash puck in the bottom. If you get something like that just break it up and vacuum it out. But just you know keep an eye on it and you'll get a feel for how often you need to vacuum it based on you know how you use it. The danger was not vacuuming the firebox is that if you have a layer of ash on the bottom of the firebox your new pellets dropping in are going to be on top of that ash. And then you'll have fire higher in the firebox which will put it closer to the auger tube where the pellets are dropping it. You do not want to start the auger tube on fire; That's called back burn. If you do get burn back (you'll notice because there's smoke coming out of your pellet hopper), just scoop all the pellets out of your pellet box, take your food off the grill, turn the grill up on high so that the auger is spinning as fast as possible, and just wait until all the pellets are pushed out of the auger into the burn box. Some of the pellets in that auger were smoldering now all the fire is in the burn box. Wait for it to cool down vacuum out the ash, break up any glass puck that's formed, and then you're good to go. If you keep it clean then you won't have burnback problems.
Do you clean the outside and of the grill or just the dust inside and grates? My grill's inner and outer surfaces seems to be getting greasy. How would you clean that?
