Pit Boss Navigator 850 Wood Pellet Grill

Best value Pellet smoker on the market – After doing months of research on various smokers I decided I didn't want to be stuck outside in the middle of the night fuelling and adjusting my smoker so I narrowed it down to a Pellet smoker. I them spent more time researching all the Pellet smoker options and ended up making an injective decision to buy this bunnings supplied unit. The good: It's big. Reasonably solid. Very easy to use. Large Pellet hopper. Reasonably easy to clean. Big solid grates which I think are ceramic coated. One fault in 2 years and otherwise it's been flawless. Covered by bunnings warranty process which is usually good.

The bad: Although reasonably solid, it's not super tight or accurate in tolerances. It works and things fit but there are gaps, minor miss alignments which don't affect function but speak to the build quality.

The paint inside the drum burns off if you use the smoker at its higher temps, apparently pit boss says its not rated for high temps.... Shouldn't you use better coatings (ceramic for example) or failing that not allow higher temps on the controller? Opening the smoker to find all my food covered in paint was not ideal. I've since just scraped or whatever paint was left off and let the fat and smoke from the meats coat the drum.

There is a slide back grate for traditional flame grilling but it's mostly useless, it's tiny, centred and highly concentrated so not ideal. If you need to flame grill I'd suggest a gas or coal bbg.

My first unit started tripping the saftey switch, an issue with the igniter. Bunnings just said go grab a brand new one and 2 years later it's still working.

After 2 years I am absolutely wrapped with the overall performance especially at the cost and with 3 years of warranty still remaining and Bunnings backup I'm not expecting to have any real significant headaches. I am glad I did not spend twice the money on and objectively similar units with someone else.