Best practice is to first conduct a burn off before you place any food in a new pellet grill/smoker to get rid of any grease etc from the manufacturing process.

However, you don’t want to go straight up to the grill’s maximum temperature as the paint finish could fail/flake off. Therefore, for the first go just set the temperature to around 250 to 300 degrees and run the pellet grill for around 30 minutes to an hour.

Before you load the pellet hopper with pellets it’s a good idea to use the Prime button on the controller to check that the auger motor is actually working correctly.