It wouldn’t be Australia in the summer without sparking up the gas burning grill machine out the back of your house and charring up a nice Costco Scotch fillet and a few shrimp…or is that prawns. Now that my barbeque is out of it’s winter hiatus I found I needed a new cover and a good solid cleaning tool.
I have had both BBQ covers and cleaning tools the past of various prices and quality, so when I saw these at Costco I figured I should try them out. And given their prices there was no harm in trying both.
First, the Grill Mate BBQ cover is a heavy polyester weave with a mesh vent to minimise moisture build up under the cover. The cover is 1.78m long, 0.68m wide and 1.07m tall which fits my 6 burner cover easily with room to spare. Costco is selling this cover at $23.39 which may be higher than the cheapest covers at Bunnings or Masters Hardware, but an willing to bet the quality of the Grill Master BBQ cover from Costco is far better than those cheaper offerings at the harware or department stores. In fact I would think Costco’s competitors would be asking upwards of $40 or even $50 for a BBQ cover like this.
The other new barbeque accessory I picked up at Costco is the Grill Mate Cleaning Brush with scraper. This BBQ cleaning tool set me back just $13.29 when I grabbed one from the Costco store in Melbourne’s Docklands.
Some people may question me writing ‘just $13.39’ if you consider that Bunnings and Masters have cheaper offerings from around the $3 mark. I have tried many of those cheap, and even more expensive, options from the hardware stores and they work well initially, but they don’t last long. The first job I did with the Grill Mate brush was the post winter hibernation clean, which in doing I would normally almost destroy a cheap BBQ brush. With the Grill Mate brush I got the job done and barely even bent a bristle.
Now for the best part…the Grill Mate BBQ brush pack Costco is selling in its Australian stores come with two spare heads. So in total you are getting 3 brushes for your money and that brings the cost of this effectively down to $4.43 per brush. That’s really not far off the cheapest $2.98 brush at Masters or $3.98 brush at Bunnings, and from my experience the product you are getting from Costco is far better.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, the body of the Grill Mate brush is a heavy gauge stainless steel with a bottle opener at the handle end. Now that is utilitarian BBQ convenience.
There are a couple of other BBQ accessories at Costco Australia that I did not grab for myself but you may want to consider if you have the need.
The first is 9kg LPG bottles. Costco has these at $24.99 each. A quick check online shows Masters selling a similar 9kg bottle at $30 and K-Mart having 9kg bottles at $35.
The other is a 4-pack of Zico refillable butane gas lighters. These are $4.69 for a pack of 4 which equates to $1.17 each. Again, a quick online search shows competitors best price on refillable gas lighters as; Coles – $10.84; Woolworths – $6.98; Bunnings – $2.44 and; Masters – $2.48. Now I am sure not all gas lighter are equal in quality or amount of butane they contain, but with Costco’s lighters at worst half the price to their competitors I am sure this is still a good deal.