Masterbuilt Gravity Series 560 Digital Charcoal Grill + Smoker - MB20040220

Purchased this as a Christmas gift and when it was used for the first time it would not work. Definitely would not have purchased if I had read more reviews. This seems to be a very common thing

This grill is awesome! By far the best grill I have ever purchased! LOVING IT.

I bought this as a replacement for the same item purchased a year ago. The product is of poor quality and cannot tolerate being out in the sun. After a year in the sun, the former product had disintegrated at many points with the fabric falling apart without any trauma. I only re-purchased the product because I couldn't find another product of the same dimensions. Masterbuilt needs some serious work on the quality of its grill covers.

I want to love this smoker and give it 5 stars but I in good consciousness cannot. The amount of tech problems I faced out of the box are ridiculous. WiFi set up took too long and after several back-and-forth conversations with support I was told that my SSID & PW could not be more than 15 characters COMBINED - thankfully I was able to purchase a cheap router and create a dedicated network just for this smoker. I shouldn't have to completely redo my home's network configuration to accommodate a single device. Disconnect Issue: I was able to get 2 cooks completed without issues but my 3rd cook a couple of days later the app completely disconnected about an hour after I started and went to bed. Thankfully the smoker continued to operate while I was asleep but I did have to completely reset up the device in order to keep a reading on my probes. Notifications & Alerts Issues: The alerts are dumb - when the device fails to come to temperature you receive a notification on your phone but there's no audible alert, instead it's a green box displays with the error. You will hear an alarm on the smoker though, and the only way to dismiss it is to manually be there to click a button and turn it off. I'd love for the ability to modify alerts and where they are coming from. I'd like to be able to turn on / off alert settings on the smoker and on my phone (I'd like an audio alert on my phone). When I dismiss an alert on either the smoker or my phone I'd like for it to stop the other device from alerting (ie - if both devices are beeping I would like to dismiss both alerts from my phone OR from the smoker). The app allows you to set temp goal - it should use data to establish an estimated time to done.

This grill DOES NOT hold up long-term. I have purchased 2 gravity series because I loved it so much. The first one quit working because I thought I used it too much. I trashed it. The 2nd one I bought stopped working less than a year of having it. So I reached out to customer service to see if they could help. They are very slow at responding but we did troubleshooting and they mailed me replacement parts. It worked for 2 cooks. Failed again. Emailed them again and same thing. Fixed but then it only fixed for 1 cook. The next cook, couple get it to work or get the temp up. And so on and so on. Each time you contact the customer support, you are assigned a case number. It's been now over a year of having the 2nd grill and I have 6 different case numbers. They horrible about actually pleasing a 2x customer. They ask the same questions after you answer them and then send you an automated response when you have any other questions. I purchased not only 1 but 2 of the 800 series. I thought it would be my forever grill or my forever brand "Masterbuilt". After dealing with customer service and the many months of trying to get this grill to work correctly as it should. I'm done. How many replacement parts they send and frustrated customers the disappoint, they could have just sent a replacement grill since this is the 2nd one that shut down less that 2 years total. Instead, maybe this review will change a few people's minds about buying this grill and hopefully they lose out on future sales. Stand by your product. People love to grill and eat, but when your product continously fails in the middle of cooking we get really frustrated. The last cook, I was making ribs, steaks, chicken and a other sides for a gathering. The grill failed on me and it was a disaster. 1 grill to fix a problem is better that missing 10 sales in the future.

This grill DOES NOT hold up long-term. I have purchased 2 gravity series because I loved it so much. The first one quit working because I thought I used it too much. I trashed it. The 2nd one I bought stopped working less than a year of having it. So I reached out to customer service to see if they could help.  They are very slow at responding but we did troubleshooting and they mailed me replacement parts. It worked for 2 cooks. Failed again. Emailed them again and same thing. Fixed but then it only fixed for 1 cook. The next cook, couple get it to work or get the temp up. And so on and so on.  Each time you contact the customer support, you are assigned a case number. It's been now over a year of having the 2nd grill and I have 6 different case numbers. They horrible about actually pleasing a 2x customer. They ask the same questions after you answer them and then send you an automated response when you have any other questions. I purchased not only 1 but 2 of the 800 series. I thought it would be my forever grill or my forever brand "Masterbuilt". After dealing with customer service and the many months of trying to get this grill to work correctly as it should. I'm done.  How many replacement parts they send and frustrated customers the disappoint, they could have just sent a replacement grill since this is the 2nd one that shut down less that 2 years total. Instead, maybe this review will change a few people's minds about buying this grill and hopefully they lose out on future sales.  Stand by your product.  People love to grill and eat, but when your product continously fails in the middle of cooking we get really frustrated. The last cook, I was making ribs, steaks, chicken and a other sides for a gathering. The grill failed on me and it was a disaster. 1 grill to fix a problem is better that missing 10 sales in the future.

2 users found this review helpful

Masterbuilt has discontinued personal customer service (voice to voice) they do not have a "call in support" model everything is done non-personal... all online and it's a difficult nightmarish process to navigate. I had mega issues just filing a warranty registration. They only give you 10mb of file space to upload your requested pics. Once I was finally able to figure out how to meet their draconian standards you get a support team that is less than friendly. I submitted a warranty claim (that took about an hour to finally execute) they came back with a response two days later letting me know that they were sorry I had a problem but the controller is on back order and they cannot tell me how long it will take before they will be able to get the part in. Okay.... well what does this mean.... The 4th of never??? Very frustrating and when I looked up reviews on Google there were instances where customers have been waiting for months for their parts. Because of their lack of service capabilities I would discourage anyone to buy from Masterbuilt. This is too bad because I really liked the grill but I think their service is very questionable and unacceptable. MB needs to be customer centric and fix their customer service and if they don't it doesn't make any logical sense of buying anything from them. You can go out and buy a boat anchor at any marine supply store for a lot less money.

I'm 4 cooks into using the AutoIgnite and I'm loving every minute of it!! Lighting this bad boy up is as easy as turning on a gas grill but with all the benefits of a charcoal grill (and more!). Being able to put this grill a low enough temperatures that I can smoke but high enough to where I can sear is an absolute game changer. Did I mentioning searing!? It has a built in sear plate on the top of the hopper, how cool is that!? I do have to say, this grill is having me contemplating selling my pellet grill! I received this product in return of an honest review.

This thing is well built. I've got tons of grills and smokers and none of them have a better cover than this.

A little about me. Not counting my four Weber kettles, I own two dedicated smokers for different tasks. I've been smoking meat for decades and very technical on the IT side. The MasterBuilt 1050, I love the simplicity of having overnight charcoal / real wood cooks with next to zero effort. Very tasty bbq but it's not all sparkles and sunshine.The wireless / Bluetooth is terrible. I can't think of any wifi integration worse than the performance / tech support provided by MasterBuilt on this product and from what I've reading online, I'm not the only one. With regards to the application communication, why can't we just use BlueTooth? As a security engineer, I have zero interest adding something to my network if i don't have to but if i do, it's expected to work. There should be no problems with wifi through a sliding glass door to the AP ~15' away. One of my issues was resolved by a known problem of limiting the SSID password to a maximum of 15 characters. That's a ridiculous security limitation is not documented anywhere in the owners manual. Wasted many hours on that one but even after that fix, the wifi works 25% of the time with me having to remove the profile each time adding it back when needed. This is only done on overnight cooks. It's 2024. These problems were worked out over twenty years ago. Very disappointing. Another small gripe is the shelving, which initially I liked, instead of deciding through well over 30 cooks that smoking results are more consistent on the middle rack. This greatly limits your footprint and my ability of even considering using the 1050 for large gatherings. There are 3rd party options out there but those look flimsy and require altering OEM mounting brackets rending the orginal racks useless. It would be great if MasterBuilt had a full size rack in the middle and bonus points if it could be folded back. Missed opportunity there. Don't get me wrong, you can make some wonderful meals on this unit. Some of my favorites were beef back, short ribs and brisket in that order. Great bark and flavor on an automated smoker! Tritip, chicken, pork chops and steaks all come out great! Sausages, salmon, pork ribs and turkey all good. Some of these were on par if not better than some of my other smoking methods. Very impressive flavor with consistent results and that really is the units saving grace. Would I buy it again? No, I absolutely would not nor would I consider procuring anything else from MasterBuilt until the network issues are worked out and being this thing has been in the wild couple years now, my hopes are not high. Fingers crossed someone internal figures out a method to address my concerns. Even if it involves purchasing newer electronics, I would be on board with that.