A lot depends on budget.For the guys here who own them the
Recteq is it when it comes to pellet smokers/grills.
Like you said he only turns 50 once.Point blank ask him what he wants and then go get it!
Not too long ago I would have supported this post. Now, I can't.
As much as I wanted to love this
Recteq RT-590 (slightly smaller version of the
RT-700) I can no longer recommend
Recteq in good conscience. I really really liked this thing when I first got it and I saw what all of the rave reviews were about. It was the significant step up from my GMG DB WiFi in just about every category and metric. Exactly what I wanted. So I thought...
Unfortunately all Recteq WiFi smokers have a fatal flaw: The notifications will fail to work during high-demand times like holidays. These also tend to be the time when you MOST need your grills notifications to work. If I ruin meat on a random Tuesday when it's just the wife and I that sucks but at least I'm not letting a dozen family members, friends or both down. That's basically what happens. The notifications just quit working w/o warning. No alerts when your smoker hits the set temperature, no alerts if your temp strays to a temperature far from your set temp and (maybe most importantly) any temperature alerts you set for the meat probes also will not work.
This is a fundamental pillar to the WiFi experience and w/o it you might as well just buy something w/o WiFi because... what's the point? At least then you'd KNOW to use some other method for temperature measuring and save a boat load of money on features that you pay for that don't work. The first time this happened (Super Bowl weekend) I thought it was a one-time thing. RecTeq even told me that they were aware of the issue and would correct it. They told me not to worry because it wouldn't happen again.
Wrong.
The very next high-traffic weekend it occurred again resulting in nearly the same thing for me: ruined food and hungry guests.
RecTeq has a real problem on theirs hands and they don't seem to care. Had I known about this before I bought mine I would have kept looking. If this is important to you I would advise looking elsewhere. If you aren't concerned about this flaw and like paying for features you don't actually get.... Recteq is your grill! Maybe they'll get their poop in a group (I use hope so since I've got about a grand wrapped up in this solution) but I wouldn't reward the bad behavior until they do. Maybe if the hit were significant enough to affect their bottom line they'd give it a little bit more urgency but I'm not convinced that anyone who can enact change even knows about this let alone cares.
At least I've done my part and people can make informed decisions rather than going in blind like I did thinking they were the greatest thing ever based on the things I read on this and other forums online.