Green Mountain Davy Crockett Review | Should You Buy It?

November 14, 2022
Written by Kristy J. Norton

I see why you want a unique pellet grill smoker like the Green Mountain Davy Crockett. You either have a small budget or a small family, or you're an RVer who likes to go camping or tailgating with your grill on board. Ultra-portable, easy to use, inexpensive, and not missing basic features like a digital WiFi controller or meat probe – these are what describe the Davy Crockett grill from Green Mountain Grills.  

With decades of experience in form of barbecue grills and smokers, I know precisely what makes a pellet smoker like the Green Mountain Davy Crockett outstanding or below par. In this Green Mountain Davy Crockett review, I'll fill you in on the good and bad of this Davy Crockett grill.

I'll tell you how well it smokes your ribs, sausages, and burgers, how suitable it is as an RV grill, and what the cooking space is like. I'll also tell you if it will meet your needs, or whether you should look for an alternative. 

Green Mountain Davy Crockett review

Overview and First Impressions of the Davy Crockett Pellet Grill 

Preview
Green Mountain Davy Crockett Wood Pellet
Green Mountain Davy Crockett Sense Mate...
Cooking Space
219 square inches
Hopper Capacity
9lbs
Heating Range
150 to 550°F
Weight
68 lbs
Electric Connectivity
12V or 120AC
Green Mountain Davy Crockett Wood Pellet
Preview
Green Mountain Davy Crockett Sense Mate...
Cooking Space
219 square inches
Hopper Capacity
9lbs
Heating Range
150 to 550°F
Weight
68 lbs
Electric Connectivity
12V or 120AC

The Green Mountain Davy Crockett is an affordable, compact, and portable wood pellet grill designed for backyard and campsite grillers. 

First, the unit is extremely lightweight and compact. It can also be transported easily. You can take it with you on the road to your next barbecue or tailgate in the park. 

The Davey Crockett is lightweight at under 68 pounds and has foldable legs. It can easily fit in the back of your truck or SUV. This pellet smoker can be powered by 110 or 12-volt power sources. It is also WiFi compatible. You read that right!

The Green Mountain grill is internet ready and the Green Mountain Grills app can be downloaded on iOS or Android like right now. So you can check it out. 

Auto-ignition technology is available on the Davy Crocket Pellet Smoker and can be configured according to your preferences. The burner pot can also be controlled by auto-ignition technology. 

This ensures that the heat remains stable and your preferences are met. This Green Mountain model has a variable grill temperature control from 150 to 550 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a great choice for slow cooking and searing.

How Does the Smoker Work?

The Green Mountain Davy Crockett pellet grill, also known as a pellet smoker, uses an electronic feed system and thermostat to add pellets to the smoker thanks to the auger motor. It starts working after you pour fuel into the pellet hopper by the left side and press the power button. 

The auger motor feeds the pellets into the heating rod to create a fire, which stops after the pellets are smoking. 

The smoker also has a convection fan that keeps the pellets burning and the heat evenly all around for even cooking. 

The smoker does all the hard work and maintains the same heat throughout the smoking process. In addition, this smoker imparts distinctive smokey flavors to the meat, depending on the wood type, which is always delightful to the palate.

Features and Benefits of the Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett 

Key Features

  • 9 pounds capacity
  • 150 to 550 degrees Fahrenheit temperature range
  • Convenient side tray
  • Sense-Mate thermal sensor 
  • WiFi control 
  • Meat probe
  • Weighs 68 pounds
  • Foldable legs 

Next, I'll share with you why I love the Davy Crockett grill and why it's my number one grill of choice.

Portability 

One of the key features of the Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett is that it is designed to be completely portable. It has handles that fold down at both sides into the legs. 

So I would say that 75 to 80 percent of the time, I have the grill in my backyard with the legs down. 

And the remainder of the time, I pull the legs up, and carry it with me to the beach, to friends' houses, to tailgating parties, and even to outdoor games. 

It's convenient and portable. It weighs just under 70 pounds, so it's not too bad for one person to be able to carry about and use it. 

Green Mountain Grills also offers a tote bag for covering the Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett. This can make it even easier to transport and carry around. So I absolutely love the portability features of the Davy Crockett grill. It's hands down the best pellet grill for on-the-move pit masters.

Electricity Connectivity Features 

Most of the time, when I'm cooking in the backyard, I need to have it plugged into a regular 110 outlet. One of the beautiful things about the Davy Crockett pellet grill is that it does come with a plug which allows me accessibility to 12-volt. It also has a 25-foot cord which you can plug into the 12-volt outlet or a cigarette outlet that's in your recreational vehicle.  

The grill also comes with a secondary plug option that features alligator clips that you can connect directly to a 12-volt battery. So it gives me some really great options when I'm away from home, and I need to run off 12-volt. 

The nice long cord is also useful for me when I want to run the grill off traditional AC in the backyard. So having that kind of portability, at least for me, is a really great feature and a fantastic option. 

Power Usage 

With the Green Mountain Davy Crockett grill, the power usage is really low. The secret to this is that its very small but powerful brushless auger motor drives the pellets. This is a 4100 RPM motor that uses just 0.45 amps of power. 

There's also a brushless DC combustion fan in the grill. Again, the power consumption is extremely low, whether running at 12 volts or 110. 

A Small-Sized Fuel Hopper 

On the left side of the fuel hopper is where you load pellets into the grill. Again, I've cooked with gas, charcoal, and a ton of different types of grills out there. My personal feeling is that nothing compares to the smoke flavor of cooking with real wood. The taste of wood-smoke cooked food is superior to anything else that's out there. 

The beautiful thing about pellet grills is that I can choose between the type of wood based on what I'm cooking or smoking within the grill. 

There are pellet options like mesquite, hickory, cherry, apple, pecan, and alder. Each type of pellet wood can accentuate whatever you're cooking inside the grill. 

The hopper is about nine pounds in capacity. It's not big since other pellet grills like Traeger's or Louisiana's have up to 20-pound hopper size. 

Davy Crockett Grill

Cost of Running It 

The Davy Crockett grill is extremely cost-efficient as far as fuel usage goes. Your average 25-pound bag of pellets costs about 20 bucks

I would say, on the lowest setting, that you'd consume under a pound of wood pellets an hour. On the highest setting, the grill doesn't take more than four pounds an hour. 

When you cook a large piece of salmon on the Davy Crockett pellet grill, you may need to smoke it first for four hours and then crank up the heat to let it sear at a really hot temperature for about 15-20 minutes. You shouldn't use more than a pound and a half of wood pellets for this cooking process. 

So when you compare the cost-effectiveness to charcoal or propane, I find that I could be saving about 1/3 of my overall fuel cost. Again for me, nothing tastes better than a pellet-smoked barbecue. 

Also, this is a great-sized pellet hopper; it's nine pounds in capacity and it allows you to fill it up. Sometimes, smaller portable pellet grills will have smaller pellet hoppers which have to be filled up fairly frequently. So I think this is a good size for a portable grill.

If I wanted to change the type of pellet that I was using – maybe I'm going from veggies to a steak and I want to go from an apple pellet to a mesquite pellet – it's easy to scoop the fuel out and add the new flavor pellet that I want. 

And lastly on pellet grilling; pellets are made from saw dusts. So they're more of a renewable energy resource than propane or natural gas grills which both use fossil fuels. So, on an energy-conscious end of things, I really like that aspect of pellet grills like this.  

A Control Panel That Works 

One of the beautiful things about this Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett and why it's so energy-efficient and fuel-efficient is the way the control board operates. This is a newer model with WiFi. You'll see an antenna coming up in the temperature control panel area. 

The WiFi controller is a pretty amazing technology that has been incorporated into the new line of Green Mountain Grills. The technology works with an app that can be downloaded on a phone. It's free and allows you to turn the pellet grill on and off. 

On the app, you can use temperature control and take a look at a bunch of different recipes. The app allows you to control all aspects of the cooking process from your smartphone. 

You don't even have to be home when the smoker is doing its thing. You can run it overnight or just a few hours before you get home from work. This smoker has a digital interface that gives you full control over its functionality.

The Food Probe and Temperature Control

First, this portable grill has a precise temperature control system. There's a food probe that goes from the actual grill to the control board. You can plug the food probe into whatever it is that you're cooking. 

To use it, push the food button to see the internal temperature of the food on the screen. You can also look at what the food probe reads on the app and see the temperature of the food. 

So, essentially from the comfort of my couch, I can turn the grill on or off. I can take charge of the temperature control; adjust it up and bring it back down.

Another thing I really liked about the probe and app combination is that they make sure that my food is never overcooked or undercooked

Ease of Use 

Personally, I've cooked on a lot of different types of fuel sources – on propane and charcoal – and I've had a ton of different types of pellet grills over the years. The GMD to me is superior. I run the grill manually most of the time myself. So, what I like about it is the one-touch start

Here's what happens while you attempt to start the grill.

When you push the power button, the grill goes through a startup mechanism. The auger motor feeds some pellets in, the little igniter or the hot rod starter heats up, and the fan comes on. 

So, it automatically starts by itself. I don't have to pull out the grill grates, manually start a fire and blow the embers like you'd need to on a charcoal grill. 

It's basically a one-click push. Within a matter of, I would say, three to five minutes on average, you will have a fire burning in the default temperature setting. The default or lowest temperature level will see the pellet grill produce 150 degrees Fahrenheit of heat. 

You can crank it all the way up to 550 degrees. However, 250 is my preferred temperature to smoke a lot of times for roasts or veggies. 

Whatever it is, I like to smoke the recipe first, and from there, I'll crank it up to temperatures like 550 degrees. This helps you to get those nice sear lines on the veggies, on a steak, or a roast. This is a great barbecuing type reverse sear smoking method. 

The smoker is also great as an oven for baking for people who like to do cookies, bread, or cakes. You can cook just about anything because it has direct and indirect flame cooking possibilities. 

The Thermal Sensor 

There's a little temperature sensor called Sense-Mate that's right in the grill, monitoring the temperature inside all the time. 

So as climate changes from winter to fall, summer, and spring, the grill is actually adjusting itself. It adjusts the rate of fuel combustion to maintain whatever temperature it is that you send. 

Therefore, it doesn't really matter what the weather is outside. It allows this unit to be really energy-efficient. The feature also allows the grill to hold the temperature that's set. 

It's always within a degree or two variance of what you set. It doesn't matter if the weather is zero degrees or 100 degrees outside. It's going to maintain and monitor the cooking temperature. 

The Interior Design 

Inside, you'll find all stainless steel grates. However, this also means that heat retention is not that great. However, the grates come right out with no hindrance when you need to clean them. You can use a standard wire cleaning brush to clean the grill grates. 

There's also a nice, angled drip pan that angles the grease down. There's also a small sheet that guides the fat down into a grease drip bucket on the backside. 

This newer design of the Green Mountain Grills DavyCrocket also has a solid stainless steel grease tray inside and under the grill.  

What the grease tray does is create a kind of protective barrier (or serve as a heat shield) from where the fire is and where the grease is. 

So, you won't run into issues with flare-ups. You will not have direct contact to fire with the food. So again, it creates more of a convection cooking inside of the grill, allowing you to smoke, baste, roast, and physically bake inside the grill. 

The Fire Pots

Underneath the grease drip tray, there is a fire baffle that spreads out the heat inside the grill. The fire pot also sits right beneath the fire baffle. 

What this does is help to spread the flame out evenly. So, whether you have a burger in the corner, right in the middle, or over in the back corner, you will have a solid even cook all the way around the grill. 

The fire pot itself is located centrally or right in the middle of the grill. Then as the fire baffle goes over, it helps spread out the flame so that heat is consistent all the way through. 

However, the firepots are difficult to pull out when you need to remove the ash. The pellets themselves produce such a small amount of ash that we don't have to actually take the items out and clean them all that often. 

However, as for myself, after every 40 pounds or so of pellets that I burn, I like to take the fire pots out and give them a good cleaning. 

Even then, there's usually less than an eighth of an inch of ash from the pellets that are left around the burn pot and actually in the burner pot. 

So, the cleaning and the maintenance as you look at this type of grill is really simple. It's pretty hands-off. When I need to get in there to clean the components, it's just a matter of minutes. 

The Cooking Surface 

As for the cooking surface, the grill has a pretty good-sized cooking capacity. It's not large and it's not too small. The cooking surface area is 219 square inches. 

You can cook a 14-inch salmon fillet or two big racks of ribs. You can make eight burgers, two chickens, or a 10-pound turkey or chicken on it. You can make a 12-pound roast too. Although it's a portable pellet grill, this thing can actually pack quite a bit in there. 

Green Mountain Grills even offers some accessories for more cooking capacity. For example, with the upper rack, you have a warming shelf where you can put your buns on the top. Then you can have your burgers and dogs underneath, getting a nice sear. This helps create more space within which I think is a great feature. 

Pros and Cons of Davy Crockett Grill 

What I Like 

  • The grill cooks evenly on all sides of the grate
  • It is app-enabled for comfortable cooking control 
  • Has a grease tray that also serves as a heat shield
  • A versatile grill for smoking, grilling, baking, and roasting 
  • The pellet fuel leaves little ashes and is ecologically friendly
  • Great smokey flavor from the pellet fuel 
  • Very affordable 

What I Don't Like 

  • The capacity can restrict your cooking needs
  • Taking out the burn pots is not so easy 
Green Mountain Davy Crockett Sense Mate...
  • Features Sense-Mate, a thermal sensor...
  • Includes a meat probe, peaked lid for...
  • Weighs 68 lbs. and folds to fits in...
  • 110V or 12V with adapters for 3 power...

Conclusion 

Overall, the Green Mountain Grills Davy Crockett is one of the best portable tailgating pellet grills on the market. In my opinion, it's one of the best grills for small families too. It creates the ultimate convenience, portability, and great smoke-flavored food which is the most important thing. So I absolutely love this portable grill. 

By Kristy J. Norton
I'm Kristy – a chef and connoisseur of all things BBQ! You can find me either in my kitchen (or someone else's) or at a big outdoor barbecue surrounded by friends and family. In both my professional and personal life I’ve picked up more than a few tips and tricks for turning out delicious food. I consider it a privilege to share it with others!
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