The Complete Handbook of Outdoor Grill Covers

Chapter 1: Understanding Outdoor Grill Covers

An outdoor grill cover is, on its surface, a simple piece of fabric. But looking at it through that lens will lead you to purchase a product that will fail within a season, leaving your investment exposed to the elements. In practice, a grill cover is a selective barrier system. It is engineered to interface with a hostile environment, protecting a complex piece of metal equipment from a specific set of physical and chemical threats. To understand what it is, you need to understand what it is fighting.

Your outdoor grill is an assembly of painted steel, stainless steel, cast iron, aluminum, and often, electronic components. Each of these materials has a distinct failure mechanism. Cast iron rusts. Painted steel oxidizes and chips. Stainless steel, contrary to popular belief, can and will corrode, particularly when exposed to chlorides from air near the ocean or from melting road salt. Aluminum pits from galvanic corrosion when it contacts other metals in the presence of moisture. Electronics suffer from moisture ingress leading to short circuits and corrosion on circuit boards. The sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a specific threat for many of these materials, fading and weakening the paint on the exterior shell, making it brittle, and causing plastic components to chalk and fail.

The grill cover is the interface between these sensitive components and the environment. It is not a waterproof envelope. In fact, a cover that is hermetically sealed is a cover that will kill