Pellet grill

"Pellet grills", sometimes referred to as pellet smokers, are backyard cookers that combine elements of charcoal smokers, gas grills, and kitchen ovens. Fueled by wood pellets, pellet grills infuse food with smoky flavor associated with charcoal grills and smokers, but offer the convenience of gas grills and the temperature control of an indoor oven. They have the ability to smoke as well as grill and bake using an electronic control panel to automatically feed fuel to the fire, regulate the grill’s airflow, and maintain consistent cooking temperatures. The best pellet grills also utilize sophisticated sensors and advanced algorithms for precision temperature control.

Pellet grills have their beginnings in pellet stoves. During the 1970s oil crisis, an increased demand for affordable home heating spearheaded a push toward alternative heat sources. One such alternative was wood pellets. Invented in the United States in the late 1970s, wood pellets are small eraser-sized capsules made of compressed sawdust. By the early 1980s, two men, Jerry Whitfield, a Boeing Aircraft engineer from Washington, and Joe Traeger, who ran a family-owned heating company in Oregon, were each experimenting with pellet-burning stoves. Although the stoves looked like traditional wood stoves, they worked much differently. Run by electricity, the pellet stoves utilized a motor-driven auger to deliver a specific amount of pellets from the storage hopper to a fire pot, where a fan aided combustion and blew the warm air from the stove.

Affordable and efficient, pellet stoves became popular in the colder climates of the Northwest and Northeast. While Jerry Whitfield would continue to make a name for himself in pellet stoves—founding Pyro Industries, the largest manufacturer of pellet stoves in the world—Joe Traeger would become synonymous with another pellet-burning product based on the same concept and design.

Joe Traeger developed the Traeger pellet grill in 1985 and patented it in 1986. The first Traeger Grills began production in 1988 and were introduced to a public that had never seen anything like them. Early Traeger Grills didn’t look all that different from traditional offset smokers with the exception of a side-mounted hopper where the firebox would typically be. However, the internal workings of the grill were unlike anything else on the market. For starters, Traeger Grills were electric and controlled by a simple three-position switch. Like the pellet stove, a rotating auger fed pellets from the hopper to the fire pot, where they were lit by an igniter rod. A fan then stoked the fire and distributed heat and smoke throughout the grill. A metal plate, called the deflector plate, sat between the fire and the grill grate, keeping food and grease from coming in contact with the flames and preventing flare-ups.

...
Wikipedia