The Grill Cover That Outlasted Three Storm Seasons

My name is Curtis Boone, and I have lived close enough to the North Carolina coast long enough to know that salt air does not ask permission before it starts eating through metal. Three years ago I stood in my backyard looking at a grill barely two years old that looked like it had been dragged up off the bottom of the Intracoastal, rust creeping through the hinges and chewing clean through both control knobs.

That grill only ever wore a cheap tarp for a cover, the kind with a thin elastic hem that lost its stretch after one humid summer, and out here that is nowhere near enough. Twenty-two years with the fire department taught me to spot equipment failing before it fails completely, and I did not catch it soon enough. When I replaced that rusted-out grill, I went straight looking for a VIBOOS 58-inch cover instead, black, heavy woven fabric, a drawstring hem, and a hook-and-loop strap around the middle, built for real coastal weather instead of a mild backyard three states inland.

I told Donna the cover mattered every bit as much as the grill itself, since a cover that fails is just a slow way of throwing your money out into the yard. That first storm season I covered the new grill every single night without exception, the same way I used to check a rig before a shift. A tropical system tracked close enough to us that fall to knock power out for the better part of a day and send a neighbor's patio chairs cartwheeling down the street. When the wind finally died down, my VIBOOS cover was still cinched in place, still on the grill, with the drawstring hem shifted maybe an inch and nothing worse than that.

The second storm season is the one that really convinced me. Frank next door had bought a similar cover for his own grill that spring, and his tore loose from a corner during a hard blow and ended up wrapped around his fence like a flag. Mine held. I remember standing on the porch with Donna watching Frank chase his cover down the yard in the rain, feeling a little guilty that I was mostly relieved my own grill was staying dry.

Three storm seasons later, the grill under that cover still looks like I bought it last spring. The one before it did not make it two years.

This past spring marked three full storm seasons with that same VIBOOS cover, and I finally sat down and really looked the grill over the way I should have with the last one. No rust on the hinges. No orange creeping around the knobs. The paint on the hood is a little duller than it was the day I bought it, which is just the sun doing what the sun does, but there is no pitting underneath it, no soft spots in the metal, nothing that tells me trouble is coming.

My grandsons Eli and Wyatt were over a few weekends back running around the patio while I was pulling the cover off to start dinner, and Eli asked why our grill looked so much newer than the one at his other grandparents' place. I told him it was not really newer, it was just protected the right way, every single night, whether a storm was coming or not. That is about as simple as I know how to put it. The habit matters, but so does what you are covering it with.

Big Earl still gives me a hard time about how particular I've gotten with that cover, cinching the drawstring tight enough to leave a crease in the fabric every night before I go inside. I tell him the same thing I used to tell rookies about turnout gear. It is boring to maintain something well right up until the day it saves you real money or real trouble, and then it is the only thing you are glad you did.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table and you asked whether a grill cover is really worth thinking hard about, here is what I would tell you straight. It is not about looks, and it is not about babying an appliance you use to cook hot dogs. It is about the difference between a grill that lasts eight or ten years and one that quietly rusts out from underneath you in two, the way mine did before I knew any better. I have run the VIBOOS cover through three hurricane seasons now, salt air every single day in between, and it has not torn, it has not blown off, and it has not let a drop of rain sit against that metal. That is not a small thing when you consider what the alternative cost me the first time around. Cover it right, every night, with something built for where you actually live, and you will not be standing in your yard three years from now wondering where all that rust came from.