Does GrillWizz work okay on round kettle grates?

Round grates do need a little more attention at the edges, mine are the same way. I usually tilt the head and go around the rim slowly instead of trying to sweep across it. Takes an extra minute but it gets the curve fine.

Round grates are just annoying for any brush honestly. I’ve got a kettle too and the corners always take extra passes no matter what I use. That’s kind of just how it goes with the shape.

I’d just take the grate off and lay it flat.

Round grates are always going to be a compromise with something like this. I’ve used mine on a kettle a handful of times and just accepted that the outer ring takes a bit more work. It’s not really a technique issue, the shape just doesn’t match.

Round grates are just a bad match for this thing, in my opinion. I had a similar setup last summer with a kettle that I dragged out of the garage. I was pretty excited to try the GrillWizz on it since I hate scrubbing by hand. The first couple of minutes felt fine, then I realized the brush head kept wanting to ride up over the bars instead of staying flat. The outer ring was especially annoying because the curve throws off the angle no matter how I hold it.

I kept at it for maybe fifteen minutes across two sessions. What I ended up doing was rotating the whole grate a quarter turn every so often and hitting the same spots from a different direction. That helped a bit, but it still wasn’t what I’d call clean. My opinion went from “this should save me time” to “this is basically the same effort with more noise.” I stopped reaching for it on the kettle after about a month and just went back to a plain scraper for that grill. The flat grates on my other setup are a different story, but round ones just don’t give the head anything consistent to grip. So no, I don’t think you’re missing some obvious trick. It’s more that the tool and the shape don’t really line up.

Tilt the head and work it around the rim slowly. That got the edges on mine fine. The middle is where it always needs an extra pass, not the curves.

Round grates only look awkward because the head is wider than the gap between the bars. I ran into that on a friend’s kettle and the brush kept catching on the hinges more than the curve itself. The curve was honestly the easy part. What helped was slowing down and letting the bristles ride along the bars instead of pushing straight into them. It still took a few passes near the outer ring, but nothing crazy. I don’t think there’s a trick that makes a round grate feel like a flat one. It’s just a slightly different motion. The flat center is where mine always needed the extra go over, not the edges. So if the rim is giving you trouble, that’s kind of the opposite of what I saw.