Electric ignitors found in pellet grills adds to the long warm-up times for pellet grills. Companies have recently tried to combat that with larger, and better ignitors, as we’ve seen with the Traeger Timberline and the Pit Boss Pro series. Blackstone has a different solution though, a gas ignitor in the fire pot.
Gas Ignitor
According to a patent that was released today, Blackstone is working on a portable pellet grill with a number of advancements over what’s on the market today. The first of which, is a more powerful, gas powered ignitor.
To supply gas to the ignitor, a small propane tank would be connected and stored in the pellet grill, as shown in the article feature image, labeled 218.
As can be seen in the image above, the item labeled 36 is a gas line that couples into an ignitor in the fire pot. It would work similar to a gas burner on a grill, or pizza oven.
Rather than waiting for an electric ignitor to heat up and begin to combust the pellets in the fire pot, a gas ignitor provides instant flame to start the burning process. It’s a great idea, and unlike anything that’s currently on the market.
To preserve the area in front of the ignitor from being filled with pellets, Blackstone has come up with various solutions. One, as shown above, is a screen that sits in front of the ignitor.
The screen serves a couple of purposes. The first is to allow oxygen get to the gas ignitor for combustion. Another purpose is the screen itself will heat up and retain heat to continue the pellet burn process.
Battery Powered
Another innovation with the Blackstone portable pellet grill, is it can be powered from a cord or with a battery. This is something that we first saw the the HALO portable pellet grill, and we’re seeing more as evidenced by the recent Pit Boss portable pellet grill release.
Different battery configurations are possible, but one option considered is to store it underneath the pellet hopper. You can see this in the image above labeled 222.
While the primary goal of the gas ignitor is to reduce warm-up times, it does have another benefit. The battery isn’t being drained through the ignitor, so it just has to power the controller and auger. This should give extra battery operation time to the grill.
A criticism we have with portable pellet grills is all the mechanics and electronics to operate a pellet grill are heavy. That leads to portable pellet grills weighing upwards of 100 lbs, which you wouldn’t want to carry around. We’re glad to see Blackstone included a cart in their design to help manage the weight.
Blackstone Pellet Grill
Blackstone currently only sells griddles and combo designs with portable gas grills. That leads to the question, will they bring a pellet grill to market?
While a patent is no guarantee, Blackstone now has quite a few pellet grill patents. They have various full-size pellet grill designs in addition to pellet grill combo designs. With the number of patents stacking up, it seems more likely that we’ll eventually see a Blackstone pellet grill.