Louisiana Grill Reviews/Thoughts

Hi All,

I am new to the forum, so please forgive me if this topic has already run its course. I owned a Traeger Grill, Texas BBQ, and sold it to a friend of mine because I moved. I want to either buy a new Taeger and also am looking at the Louisiana Grill CS-680.

Any recommendations on either? I want to keep the price down to $1000 or so.

Thanks for all of your replies.

Yeti

My opinion would be to avoid Traeger and to go with Louisiana grill or better yet Green Mountain.

I will tell you why.

Traeger has really not improved their temperature control and it pisses me off from an engineering standpoint. Really there is no excuse for their current set up, I want a smoker that is set it and forget it. The Traeger has temp swings of 75 degrees, what happens is once your set temp. is reached it goes into a timer setting and dumps pellet regardless of temp. and is set by what they call the P-time. Also the fan is not controlled at all. Something as simple as a PID controller could solve this problem in not time.

Green Mountain lock in temps. much better and they only are of by 5 degrees or so which is plenty accurate.

Another thing too is Traeger is shipping stuff in from China and using cheep metal, China can go jump and anything made there is inferior to things made in the US.

I don't know if you made your purchase yet, but here's my two cents. I have a CS-570, and although it cooks well (from my limited time with it), my experience with their customer service has been mixed.

When I first purchased it, I thought I was having temperature issues. My hood thermometer would read 100+ degrees hotter than the grid. Their support told me there should be no temperature variations in the unit at all and so they sent me a new hood thermometer thinking that was the issue. After that didn't resolve the issue, they told me to seal the burn pot to ensure there were no gaps between it and the fan. Tried that, that didn't work. I found this site and one of the guys on here actually helped me diagnose my problem. In the end it was:
1) more ignorance on my part not realizing that the hood temp will always very between the hood and the grid
2) the placement of the hood thermometer on my unit is all the way on the left side of the unit at the hottest point, so perhaps not great engineering
3) poorly constructed burn pot

In the meantime the powder coat on the lid started to bubble up and rust. I asked Danson's to send me a new lid since I had had it for no more than a week at this point which they did, but the lid they sent had a flat spot on the right side which caused about a 1/2 in gap between the bottom right of the lid and the smoker body allowing heat to escape. In addition they sent a new and much better constructed burn pot, but the new design didn't fit my unit. When I talked with Danson's about these items they pretty much gave up and sent me back to the dealer who will hopefully be able to hand work the unit. Their response was that they were just a small fab shop and that this was now eating into their profit (like I give a sh*t, just fix it). So, three months after purchasing the unit, it now sits down at the dealer waiting for him to see if he can fix it. If he can't I'm not sure where to turn next.

A lot of guys love their Louisiana Grills on here and I hope to be one of them once I get mine back. Just be warned, their customer service is a little suspect. They'll make an effort, but once repairing their equipment starts to cost them money, they disappear. Hopefully you'll be one of the many out there that don't have any problems though.