How I shocked my 20 year-old gas BBQ back to life with an electric conversion

My 20 year-old gas BBQ had seen better days. I’d already replaced the cast iron hotplates a couple of times and the burners at least once, but the plates were starting to rust again.

Firing it up was also becoming painful with its unreliable clicker, so I’d often have to grab some matches and risk gassing myself in the meantime. 

I was reluctant to replace the hotplates again on such an old BBQ and was not keen to invest in a new gas appliance either, after electrifying the rest of my house 2 years ago. I had been looking at electric BBQs for a while, although they are surprisingly hard to find and either very small or crazy expensive when you do find one.

While chatting with a friend about the predicament, he suggested a small induction cooktop and griddle like this would work well as a replacement. He had already bought both items too, although hadn’t gotten around to setting his new cooktop up or trying it out yet.

Inspired by this, I went home and ordered myself the same EuroChef 30cm 2 zone cooktop for $139 from one of the big online retailers.

I also started to dream up ideas for building a cabinet and benchtop on wheels that I could use it with, complete with stainless steel top and lightning bolt design. Please excuse my poor drawing skills, you get the idea though.

Initial sketch for my induction BBQ cabinet. Source: Tim Eden

We chose this particular cooktop as it comes already wired with a standard 15 A plug, so all you need is a 15 A power point nearby to use it. There are similar size cooktops which include a handy feature to combine both zones into one, but their instruction manuals say they need to be hardwired by an electrician.

In the meantime, I made a temporary stand with a melamine board left over from some shelving, that I raised up by 50 mm to give the cooktop enough airflow while operating. I also had the 15 A outlet ready to go, after my electrician installed one at the same time as a new solar and battery system.

Testing the induction BBQ with sausages using a temporary stand. Source: Tim Eden

The first thing I tried cooking was some good old snags, using the temporary stand sitting on top of the old BBQ as this is where the power point was.

They turned out OK, although the difference between using this and the old gas BBQ would take some getting used to. For example, what heat setting to use, where the plate gets hottest and so on.

One of the advantages of having an induction cooktop outside is that you can use all of your regular pots and pans from inside, so you aren’t limited to hotplate style cooking.

Every now and then we make butter basted steak from RecipeTin Eats which is delicious, but makes a mess in the kitchen! Now I can cook them outside and the clean up is so much easier.

Cooking butter basted steak outside. Source: Tim Eden

After cooking a few different things with the temporary stand, I was happy the new setup was going to work well enough that I could get rid of the old gas BBQ altogether. The griddle is definitely smaller than the old BBQ, but only a bit less than half of the cooking area of a regular 4-burner, which is all I tended to use most of the time anyway.

Rather than build a whole new cabinet, a different friend and I were chatting about this and came up with the idea to repurpose an old BBQ discarded in the council cleanup as they are often lying around. Straight away this turned into the obvious solution of converting my existing BBQ instead.

Just like an electric vehicle conversion, the first step was to remove all of the unnecessary parts. Out went the hotplates, burners, drip tray, hose and gas bottle. This left me with a surprisingly light, open frame that is so much easier to wheel around than it used to be with all of the heavy components.

Even with the new induction cooktop installed it is still so much lighter and more manoeuvrable. For the cutout I used another piece of the leftover melamine board, I was down to my second last piece after making another temporary stand for the friend who inspired this whole idea. 

Induction cooktop installed into my old BBQ frame. Source: Tim Eden

Now that I have converted my old BBQ from gas to electric, I love using it again. I have the old hotplates and burners just in case I need to reverse the conversion, but I highly doubt they will ever see the light of day. 

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