I left the Current where it was and walked around the outside of the house, frequently returning to the main breaker box to see which outlets were connected to sufficiently powerful breakers, and found an outlet on the side of the house that gets especially hot at the end of the day—that is, during grilling time. I lugged the grill noisily up to it.
At that point I started texting my Seattle electrician, Will Gebenini, to find out how likely it was that other people with porches, outlets, and breaker boxes were having similar problems.
“Well, it’s almost 100 percent likely that they will have a 15-amp outlet if the construction is new,” he said, “but it’s very difficult to predict whether the outlet will be on a 15-amp or 20-amp circuit. Newer codes require an outlet on patios or decks. No code specifies the current rating of that circuit.”
“So,” I asked, “it’s a long shot whether your porch will have the right configuration or not?”
“Correct.”
Since you can’t just change breakers without a second thought, it means you might not be able to put a grill like this where you want it, or you might have to call someone like Will to do it, in which case your new electric grill goes from expensive to very expensive.
Advanced Degrees
I fired up the Current grill again, put the sausages back in, and felt like they came out fine, but I had to pay attention to a lot of things. There’s a digital display on the grill and a bit of a touchscreen, as well as a single knob. (Hurrah for the knob!) There are two cooking zones, so you can also set the temperature for each side of the grill and do a little sizzle on one side and a little slow cook all the way through on the other.
There’s the room temperature cooking feature and that mobile app that connects your phone to the grill, and normally I’d tell you more, but problems started blooming like wildflowers, stealing all my attention.
Even moving the grill to an inconvenient location to meet its electrical needs, it took a while to heat up. long time. It’s impressive that you can set both sides to heat up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. However, on a hot New England summer day, I cranked the right burner up to 600 degrees, and after 20 minutes, it was barely above 450. Even with more patience, it struggled to reach those higher temperatures, and turning it up or down a few degrees lacked the snappy responsiveness of a propane grill.
The big problem here is that the larger the cooking surface on an electric grill, the harder it is to get enough juice. On a propane grill, you just turn on another burner. On a charcoal grill, you can add charcoal or increase the airflow. On an electric grill this size or larger, you can cheat a little, but unless you want to plug it in and do some electrical work, you’re mostly limited to how it’s designed.