Weber Spirit E-325 review: a practical three-burner with no side burner

What the step up buys

Three burners, cast iron grates under porcelain enamel, and a 10-year limited warranty. That is the whole pitch, and it is a better pitch than it reads. Grates and warranty decide whether a gas grill is still worth lighting in year six. Burner count only decides how many people eat at once.

The lid-open height is 60.50 inches. That is worth checking before the grill is assembled under a soffit or low overhang.

What you do not get is a side burner. Two side tables instead. A side table is a fine place to park a tray of raw chicken and a poor place to put a pot of sauce, and no accessory has ever turned one into the other.

Choose it for the main grate, not the warming rack

The total is 450 square inches, but 360 of that is the primary grate. The other 90 is a warming rack for buns and finished food. Decide whether the grill fits your household from the main grate, then use the upper shelf as overflow.

360 square inches feeds four with room to shuffle food off the heat, and stretches to six. Two people get a lot of hot empty steel.

The three main burners are rated at 31,000 BTU per hour across that 360 square inch grate. The number describes input, not measured preheat or recovery, so it should not decide the purchase on its own.

The 31,000 figure covers the three main burners only. The Sear Zone boost burners sit outside it, so treat that number as baseline input rather than the whole heat system under the lid.

Fuel, grease and a permanent parking spot

Propane asks less of you than any other fuel in the yard, and it still asks. Keep a spare tank. A tank runs dry with the chicken half cooked and at no other moment in recorded history.

Work out whether your area does exchange or refill. Exchange is faster. Refill gets you a full tank rather than whatever the last person handed back.

Cast iron under enamel wants a brush and a thin coat of oil while it is still hot, not a soak in the sink on Sunday. Enamel is a coating. Coatings chip when you go at them with steel and enthusiasm. Grease trays get emptied on a schedule you choose, or on a schedule a flare-up chooses for you.

Then there is where it lives. 48.3 inches wide, 26.6 deep, 46.2 tall with the lid down, 98 pounds, two wheels. Two wheels under 98 pounds is not portability. It is permission to move the thing far enough to sweep behind it. So assemble it in the spot you want it standing for the next decade.

After the sticker, plan on a cover, a spare tank, a brush or scraper you do not hate, and an instant-read thermometer. A lid-mounted gauge reads the air by the lid, which is not where your chicken is. None of that is optional in practice, whatever the box implies.

Natural gas is a SKU here, not a project

There is a factory natural gas version of this grill. That one sentence saves you from the worst idea in gas grilling.

Do not convert the propane model. Weber sells no conversion kit for it, the third-party kits that exist void the 10-year warranty, and conversion means changing gas orifices, which is licensed work. A web page is not where anyone should learn that. If your house has natural gas, buy the natural gas SKU and pay a licensed gas fitter to run the line to the spot where the grill will stand. Budget time for that line, and check whether your municipality wants a permit, because plenty of them do.

Every figure here belongs to the propane model. The natural gas version carries its own numbers, and they are not repeated here, so do not assume the 31,000 crosses over.

Spring startup and first-cook checks

Gas grills fail in a short and boring list of ways. Igniters give up, and it is usually the battery or the wire rather than the electrode. Grease trays get ignored until a flare-up makes the argument on your behalf. Burner tubes clog with debris and spider webs, which is why burners light unevenly on the first warm weekend of spring. Enamel chips where metal tools land, and bare cast iron rusts.

Every item on that list is a part, not a dead grill. That is the entire argument for a 10-year limited warranty, and it is why the warranty line deserves more of your attention than the BTU line.

Before the first cook, walk a slow lap of the assembly. Count the burner tubes and check that each one seats properly on its valve orifice, because a tube sitting slightly off is the classic reason a burner will not light. Confirm the grates sit flat and the enamel is intact. Check the hose and regulator against the parts list, and make sure the hose is not pinched under the cart. Then run soapy water over every connection with the tank on and the burners off. Do that every time you fit a tank, not only the first time. That is a propane rule, not a Weber rule.

Cross-shop, including when the cheaper grill wins

If two of you eat off it and no crowd is coming, a two burner costs less and asks less of your patio. Start on the gas grills page and compare the main cooking surfaces.

If flavor matters more to you than a weeknight schedule does, the Weber Original Kettle 22 does things no gas grill can do, and asks you to tend a fire in exchange. A kettle rewards the tending. It is also the wrong answer when three hungry people are waiting and you have thirty minutes. The same trade runs through the rest of charcoal grills.

The E-325 loses to a kettle on flavor and loses to a two burner on footprint. It wins the moment the problem is Tuesday dinner for four, and it keeps winning in year six if the grates and the warranty do their jobs.