I bought this grill on the advice of some friends. Initial research showed that people who love it, really love it; the idea of no flare-ups was a plus. I figured for the 1200-plus bucks I paid for the Epic and the Sear-Mate, I'd get a really high-quality grill. It took a while to put it together, and you have to soap-test all the fittings (this threw me for a loop...I'd bought many grills before and this was the first one where I had to do the QA). The door latch is a cheap plastic magnetic thing that broke pretty quickly. The door itself has a handy little shelf, and it has holes on the inside, ostensibly for some hooks that you would be able to hang grill tools from, but you'd need very short grill tools, and the hooks don't stay in the holes--they fall out as soon as you open (or close) the door. So that was kind of disappointing.
The promotional videos on their website show people smoking meat, and slow cooking. If you fill the pan with water, you can lower the temperature to 300. That's not really low enough temperature, though, for true slow-cooking. I ended up slow-cooking for several hours in the oven, then moving the meat to the grill to finish. It's a compromise that produces OK results, but if they had an actual flame control, you could actually do some great slow-cooking in the grill. Odd how that bit of seemingly simple technology has evaded the engineers at Holland. The little smoking chips drawer is a joke. It's located too far from the heat to be effective...Sometimes it would put off a little smoke after a half hour or so, sometimes the chips would just sit there...the ones on the bottom might char a little, but most of them were still intact. Even when it did work, the smoke was just not enough; some leaked out the front of the drawer, and most of it would rise around the drip pan. I ended up installing a Big Kahuna smoke generator from SmokeDaddy. It fixed the smoke problem, but I just never got great results, because you couldn't slow cook.
Reliability sucks...I've had to replace at least part of the gas delivery system 3 times, once because it leaked, flared up and burnt the entire control panel up. Never had as bad an experience with any other grill, even cheapies. It's sitting on my deck useless now because I won't pay them for another regulator hose. Don't waste your money, especially if you want to do ribs or other things. It does cook a good steak, and chicken and pork chops, but what grill doesn't? For the same money, you could get a decent pellet grill, or buy a higher-end grill with temperature control, and install a smoke generator.
