Greetings from San Antonio

[gcdmd]

+3. Can't go wrong.

[Mr. Bones]

Howdy from Kansas Territory, Welcome to Th Pit!

Lookin forward to learnin along with, an from ya!

I'd haveta agree: A Weber kettle is a Great Place to start yer charcoal adventure, an hone yer fire management skills...

[Santamarina]

Welcome from California!

My first charcoal grill was actually my old gasser...when the burners finally rusted out I pulled everything out and started using charcoal in it!

It didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t an ideal cooker since it didn’t have any air flow control down below, so I picked up a Webber kettle.

That kettle served my grilling and smoking needs for well over a decade!

[Redwng]

Welcome from St. Cloud, FL.

[Panhead John]

glitchy You got a Mak 1? When? Why didn’t ya tell us? 😂😂😂.
Just kidding buddy.
Good recommendations for him!

[glitchy]

Welcome to the pit! There's so many options in both these areas. If you're a buy once cry once type, you can just fit two amazing cookers into a $3000 budget.

If you want to use it all at the price of a few nights on the sofa you could go:
Weber E6 Kamado for charcoal. It will run a lot of hours unattended as a smoker too and can easily run 10 plus hours unattended with an automatic temperature control system (though you can run very well without too, it holds stable temps for a long time).
MAK 1 Star General pellet grill. The construction and warranty of MAK grills is pretty hard to beat. I just got a 2 Star myself and the build quality is pretty amazing. The smoke levels seem to be very high for a pellet grill too, but I only have a few cooks in to judge upon.

There are a lot of fairly nice pellet grills in the 600-1200 range too. I've had really good luck with CampChef and they have a lot of nice features for the price. A lot of folks around here have Grilla and RecTec pellet grills and seem to be very satisfied.

For charcoal, I love my Weber Summit Charcoal Grill (essentially Gen 1 of the new E6 Kamado). I had a 22" kettle, then a performer before it. They were both good cookers as well. If you're primarily going to just 'grill' and don't see smoking often on it, a Weber Performer might be a better choice, You can use all the same accessories on a Performer that fit the 22" kettles, but you get a nice big work table beside it.

[Andreugv1]

Thank you all, really appreciate the warm welcome and pointers. I will have follow-up posts on the Charcoal and Pellet grill sections if I cannot find the information! SnS looks great!

[Whiskeyman53]

Welcome to the pit from the bbq capital of New England, Massachusetts.

[Starsky]

Welcome! I just picked up a 22" Weber. Decided to brush up on the old school methods again

[Stuey1515]

Welcome from Oz, you will like it here

[Sweaty Paul]

Salutations from Hays, Kansas!

[mcook2201]

Greetings and welcome from North Carolina.

[Blues1]

Welcome from South Carolina!

[DavidNorcross]

Welcome from Virginia!

[bbqLuv]

Hello from NW Oregon.
Happy BBQ'n to you