Pellet Grill Covers & Accessories

Four accessories matter. The rest are optional.

Ranked by how much each improves the grill per dollar spent, four things sit well clear of everything else — and together they cost less than one bag of premium pellets:

1. A cover. Weather, not price, is what kills pellet grills. Powder-coated steel, electronics bolted to the outside, and a hopper full of moisture-absorbing fuel all hate rain.
2. A smoke tube. Single-digit dollars for roughly four hours of extra real smoke on any grill. It is the cheapest meaningful upgrade in pellet grilling and it also lets you run a second wood flavor.
3. Grease pan liners. They turn the worst cleaning job into a lift-and-bin, which means it actually gets done — and accumulated grease is a fire risk, not just unpleasant.
4. A sealed pellet container. Damp pellets crumble and jam augers, which is the most common pellet grill failure in the first year and almost always a storage problem.

Notice what is not on that list: nothing expensive, and nothing that changes how the grill cooks directly. These four prevent the things that go wrong.

The full ranking by improvement per dollar

The fitment problem, and how to avoid it

Covers, shelves and drip-tray liners are all model-specific, and third-party fitment lists are approximate. Before ordering any of them:

• Find your exact model number — on a plate inside the hopper lid, or on the original box. “A Pit Boss 850” could be an 820 Deluxe, an 850 DX, an Advantage 850SL or a Navigator 850, and their dimensions differ.
• Measure the grill — width at the widest point, depth including the hopper, height with the lid closed. Two minutes, and it avoids a return.
• Account for a front shelf. A cover sized for the bare grill will not go over an extended folding shelf. Fold it down, or size up.

We have brand-specific fitment pages for Pit Boss and Traeger, because those are where the model-name confusion is worst.

The two accessories that are really safety items

Worth separating out, because they get bought for convenience and matter for a different reason.

Grease liners. Accumulated grease in a drip tray or bucket is a fire risk, and the risk peaks when you run a high-temperature cook over a full tray. Liners make emptying trivial, which is what prevents accumulation. See liners and drip trays.

An ash vacuum. Not the vacuum itself — the thing it replaces. People use shop vacs on grill ash, and fine ash clogs the filter while a live ember in a plastic canister full of dry ash is a genuine fire hazard. If you take one thing from this section: let the grill go fully cold, and use the right tool. See ash vacuums.

What we deliberately do not recommend

Rather than list products we would not buy and link them anyway, here is what is missing from this section on purpose: branded rubs and sauces (often the same products as the supermarket versions at a premium), insulated blankets unless you genuinely cook below 40°F, rotisserie kits for pellet grills (the chamber airflow fights them), and third-party replacement controller boards, which are a warranty problem dressed up as an upgrade.