I left the Current where it was and made a loop around the outside of the house, often doubling back to the main breaker box to see which outlets were connected to breakers that were strong enough and found a plug on the side of the house which gets extra hot at the end of the day, aka grilling time. I rolled the grill noisily here.
At this point I started texting my Seattle electrician, Will Gebenini, to find out how likely it was that other people with porches and plug and breaker boxes would have similar issues.
“Well, there’s almost a 100 percent chance they’ll have a 15-amp outlet if the construction is a newer build,” he said, “but it’s very hard to predict if the outlet is on a 15- or 20-amp circuit. . The newer ones code requires an outlet on patios/decks. No code specifies the ampacity of that circuit.”
“So,” I asked, “it’s a crapshoot if your porch is going to have the right setup?”
“Right.”
Since you can’t just switch breakers around willy-nilly, this means you might not be able to put a grill like this where you want it, or you might have to call someone like Will to do it, at the point that your new electric grill goes from expensive to very expensive.
Advanced Degrees
I turned the Current back on, threw those sausages in there again, and it felt like it came out fine, but I had a lot to pay attention to. There’s a digital readout on the grill and a small touchscreen, as well as a single knob. (Yay knobs!) There are two grilling zones, so you can also set the temperature for each side of the grill and do a little sizzle sizzle on one side and a little coasting until done on the other side.
There’s the to-the-degree cooking feature, and that mobile app that connects your phone to the grill—and normally I’d tell you more, but problems started blooming like wildflowers, stealing everything my attention
Even by moving the grill to an inconvenient location to meet its electrical needs, heating it up took a long time. Amazingly, you can set both sides to heat up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. But on a hot summer day in New England, I turned the right burner up to 600 degrees, and after 20 minutes it was barely clearing 450. Even with more patience, it struggled to hit higher that temperature, and turning it up or down a few notches lacks the nimble response of a propane grill.
The big problem here is that the larger the grilling surface on an electric grill, the harder it is to get enough juice out of it. With a propane grill, you just turn on the other burner. With charcoal, you can add more charcoal or increase the air flow. With an electric this size or larger, you can cheat a little, but unless you want to hard-wire it and do some electrical work, you’re mostly just stuck with how it’s designed.
