MOTORIZED GRILL BRUSH

A great tip for successful grilling is a clean cooking grate. A clean grate will help produce great grill marks, help food from not sticking and get rid of any unwanted flavors. A good sturdy wire brush is an essential tool to achieve this goal. Along comes the Broadstone Motorized Grill Brush. This is an battery powered rotating wire brush with the added bonus of steam. In theory this sounds fantastic. Steam cleaning your grill with out any physical effort may be the ticket to barbeque perfection. I came across this item with the purchase of the craigslist Man Grate. He threw this motorized brush in for a cheap song. Let's go clean some grates.

The motorized grill brush takes a lot batteries, eight AA batteries to be exact. This is a fairly simple task to load the batteries. A flick of the switch and the two wire brushes spin to life. The next step is to load the steam chamber with water. There is a little flap at the end of the handle which can be held under the faucet for easy filling. We purposely left a dirty grill for demonstration purposes. A charcoal fire was built and the brush was put through its paces. There is a little button to press which pumps a stream of water. The grill was hot and we went to work. Pushing the button, shot a stream of water on the hot grill grate which did produce steam. We rolled the spinning brushes over the dirty grill. It did clean the surface fairly well but did not reach far enough below to clean in between the grates.

FAIL. There is a major problem in the design of this product. First, if you look at this image there is a space and material between the two rotating brushes. This acts as a platform bevel which hits the grill limiting how far and deep you can go between the grills. Second the brushes size combined with this platform is just to small to get between larger grates. This product may work if your grill grate is the standard issue steel grate that comes with the kettle bbq but is a major fail with any grate that is larger. Unfortunately the Broadstone Motorized Grill Brush did not reinvent the wheel today. This tool would be relegated to the back of the tool drawer if it fitted.