The Best Smart Devices For Making The Most Of Your Backyard And Garden
Whether you’re a grilling novice or a pitmaster, a smart grill provides a better way to monitor your meat or veggies without having to hover over a scorching, 400-degree iron grate. Smart grills use thermometer probes and a combination of wireless signals for remote control: Bluetooth for close proximity (when you’re near the grill) and Wi-Fi for when you’re out of Bluetooth range. Wi-Fi also brings the option to tie your grill into other smart-home platforms, including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, so you can do handy things like asking Alexa what the temperature of your chicken is while your hands are wrist-deep in brownie batter. Some devices allow you to adjust the temperature remotely, via an app or even voice control, and smartphone notifications ensure you don’t end up with cinders for dinner.
There are a number of outdoor Bluetooth thermometers, but in our tests, we found the limited range of this technology results in poor user experience, despite a relatively high price tag (we don’t recommend any in our guide to probe thermometers).
Our pickTraeger Ironwood 650 Pellet GrillThis impressive smoker grill has a built-in temperature probe, and it can be remotely monitored and controlled via an app, making it nearly set-it-and-forget-it simple.
Traeger’s Ironwood 650 Pellet Grill is an all-in-one smoker-oven-grill with wireless connectivity that lets you step away from cooking duties with confidence, while still being able to monitor or adjust settings as needed remotely. A built-in probe thermometer takes the guesswork out of doneness—you can pop open the app to view temperatures on your smartphone, or even ask a voice assistant like Alexa to check in on things. The app also lets you adjust the temperature of the grill, get alerts when your food is done, and even shut down the grill—an amazing convenience, and also a terrific safety feature. (Wirecutter Senior Writer Lesley Stockton selected the Traeger Pro 575 as a pellet-fuel grill pick. However, she was unable to use the smart features during testing due to range issues with a Wi-Fi router that was in a far-away indoor closet; it’s a great budget option since it’s a few hundred dollars cheaper yet has most of the same smart features.)
The Traeger is fueled by wood pellets (which run $18 to $20 a bag) and is primarily a smoker or oven. Although we had success grilling steaks, burgers, and hotdogs, the Traeger doesn’t have an open flame and doesn’t offer the high searing heat or convenience that a traditional grill offers. So we would opt for one of our gas grills or charcoal grill picks, combined with the Weber Connect, below if you want your grilled meats to have the dark, seared crust you get only with scorching-high heat.
When you use the Traeger as a smoker, it’s wonderfully freeing to be able to keep tabs on what is normally a long and sometimes fussy cooking process without having to stand guard by the grill. You can literally just set it and forget it. We found the Traeger to be far more versatile than a standard propane grill—it was able to roast a chicken and braise a brisket, and even bake cinnamon rolls and apple pies. We smoked sausages and then baked them with potatoes in a cast-iron grill for an awesome breakfast dish.
Traeger’s grills are the only fully smart ones around, and our experience was very good. We had no problem getting the Traeger connected to Wi-Fi, despite being a fair distance and a few walls from our router, and the app interface is clean and easy to use (once you get past all the featured recipes and videos, which are a bit distracting). In our testing, we cooked five whole chickens, four steaks, four pork tenderloins, and a rack of ribs on the grill, and they all came out juicy and flavorful.
Using the app we were able to select our preferred recipe and have it automatically dial in the temperature while we prepped the food—there’s no need to stand and watch a gauge, as you do on a regular grill. We used the app’s step-by-step cooking guides to send the recipe to the grill. So all we had to do was put the food on the grill, and it took care of the rest, from pre-setting the temperature and the timer to regulating the probe as it cooked. There is only one probe, so you can monitor just a single dish, even if you’re cooking multiple things.
You don’t have to follow the built-in recipes, however, and in that case, the alarms are the most useful smart feature. You can set them for the probe thermometer and the timer, and once they’re set, just put the dish on the grill and step away; you get a notification on your smartphone when the food is ready. We also regularly used a voice assistant to check the progress, finding it easier than pulling out our phone while prepping dinner. Reassuringly, you can skip the smart features and control the Traeger using its built-in control screen, should you prefer not to use your phone. All the smart features, plus the pellet mechanism, require electricity, so this grill needs access to an AC outlet.
The Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub is a Wi-Fi–enabled probe thermometer with a magnetic base that sticks to the side of a grill and supports up to four plug-in probe thermometers (it comes with two, and is compatible with Weber iGrill probes), so you can monitor four portions of food simultaneously. The Weber Connect app offers step-by-step guides, provided by smart-oven makers June, for grilling most cuts of meat and fish.
Although the Traeger can be fully remotely controlled, the Weber Connect allows you to only monitor the doneness of food, which makes it far less powerful. Still, we like that it can be attached to any grill and has multiple probes and that its features are useful, allowing you to set a desired level of doneness, get notified when to flip food, and receive alerts when your dogs are ready—no matter how far away from the grill you are.
The Connect does have a few flaws, including that there’s no physical on/off button; instead, you need to press the device on the front and back simultaneously to turn it off. We discovered we had left it on the next time we hoped to grill and found the battery was dead (nicely, it recharges via an included USB cable). It can also hold up to four probes, but each recipe in the app recognizes only one probe, so you have to set up separate cook cycles for each item on the grill. This can make it difficult to follow in the app if you’re cooking more than one thing.
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