While the Zgrill looks like the silverback, If you look at the details, things show up which makes me believe that the quality is better in the Silverback. A digital control with meat probe, that can be set in 5 deg increments. The Silverback has a stainless top that is reinforced to help it keep it's shape. The Silverback is double lined in the bottom. I don't know about the Zgrill. The Silverback has stainless steel cooking grates, I don't know about the Zgrill.
Metal gauges used may be different.
The Grilla Silverback reportably has good customer service.
Taking all this into account, at $699 + free shipping, the silverback may be the better deal.
I know this is re-opening up an old thread, but I'm one of the potential suckers ;-) I have been wanting a pellet grill for quite a while and saw the rebate and bit. As I told my wife, if they aren't there in 5 years at least we ate 5 years worth of food. I was anticipating buying a grill anyway and this just tipped me into it. If I don't get the rebate then another grill was possibly a better deal, but we'll see.
Anyway about the grill, from what I can tell I'm guessing this is a factory that contracted to make grills for Traeger and possibly others. The manual for the grill appears to be word for word identical to a Traeger manual I found online. It looks like replacement parts will match up at least when looking at pictures and reading descriptions. Or as someone mentioned here they have knocked it off, but they are advertising so hard I'd think it would have had Traeger going after them by now if it was that. Anyway, doesn't really matter.
I got it middle of August and since then have only skipped using it one weekend. I've made burgers, dogs, rib eyes, chuck roasts, the obligatory butt, a pork loin, turkey, chicken parts, brats and have been very happy with the results. The smoke flavor isn't 'strong, as I've gathered for the most part it never is with a pellet grill, but I like how things off of it taste and my wife "hates" strong smoke flavor and she likes what is coming off of the grill. So I view the flavor as a nice compromise. I may look into something augment the smokes as I've seen suggested on the site, but it isn't a priority for me.
The grill comes to temp and maintains pretty well with zero work from me. I loved the food off my WSM, but turns out I'm lazy and wasn't using it much since it was so much in out, tweak this tweak that. I've run the Zgrill with my Smoke thermometer and using the Smoke Gateway have some pretty good graphs showing the controller does, what I consider, a totally adequate job. Once set it swings of course, but really about what I've read, within normal ranges for a "Traeger" with a standard, rather than PID controller. Below is a screen shot of a cook I did with a turkey. The grill probe, yellow graph, was placed on the grate next to the bird and I think I set on 350 to get the temp shown at the grate. Later, you can see where I opened the lid and did this, I was tricked by poor probe placment in the turkey and I turned up to 375 and ended up with a dry bird. Not the grills fault, but a mistake on my part. Right now I think they are running a buy one get one offer, which if I had know they would do that is what I'd have done. No worrying about waiting for a rebate that frankly is very likely not to happen. But I've enjoying the grill and think it seems to be of good enough quality to keep me going for quite a while. I had a part damaged in shipping and they replaced it within a week so at least at first customer service appears to be on top of things. I hope this helps at least get a little knowledge out there.
Large Big Green Egg, Weber Performer Deluxe, Weber Smokey Joe Silver, Fireboard Drive, 3 DigiQs, lots of Thermapens, and too much other stuff to mention.
Very interesting! Yes, the current BOGO deal I see them pushing is enough to scare me away... but then your experience causes me to pause for a minute. Would not have expected to hear such a solid review.
If not cooking outdoors, I am cooking on the stovetop with my 14" carbon steel wok, 12" CI skillet, or in the oven with my two Lodge CI pizza pans, or two dutch ovens. I've also got a nifty Lodge carbon steel grill pan that rocks for veggies outdoors.
The Grilla Facebook page is pretty sure Z Grills has basically taken the Silverback design from the Chinese factory, stripped out some of the cost by using a dumber controller, cheaping out the top, removing the double lining, and using cheaper materials.
This is a risk for any company making goods in Chinese factories sadly. It happened to my employer, and suddenly the Chinese factory making stuff that we had patents on in North America and Europe had patents in the China and Taiwan under their name, and they stopped delivering to us.
6000 years of uninterrupted business culture. They know all the tricks. On the other hand, as far as the quality of goods go, it's pretty much all on the importer: spec quality, and you'll get quality.
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