Inside the cookbox

Flavorizer bars and heat plates: when to swap them

Every gas grill has angled metal between the burners and the food. It goes by half a dozen names and it is meant to be replaced.

Written on the bench, checked 2026-09-09

Same part, different names

Weber calls the angled bars over its burners Flavorizer bars. Other makers put the same piece in the same place and call it a heat plate, a heat tent, a flame tamer, a vaporizer bar, or a burner shield. If you are searching by name and finding nothing, try the other names before you conclude the part does not exist.

The job is the same in every cookbox. It spreads the heat of a narrow burner across a wide grate, and it catches fat before the fat reaches the burner tube. Drippings hit hot metal, turn to smoke, and go back up through the food. That is where the flavor part of the name comes from.

It is a consumable, not a fixture

These pieces sit directly in grease and direct flame for the whole life of the grill, so they wear out on a schedule while the frame around them lasts for years. Porcelain coated steel gives up first, because once the coating chips the steel underneath rusts fast. Stainless lasts longer and still thins eventually.

People replace burners far more often than they need to for this reason. A grill cooking hot on one side and cool on the other usually has a collapsed bar, not a dead burner.

Four signs it is time

Pull the grates and look straight down. You are checking for daylight and for shape.

• Holes rusted through the peak, which lets grease land on the burner tube instead of vaporizing.
• Sagging or twisted bars that no longer sit flat on their end tabs.
• Porcelain flaking off in sheets, which ends up on the food.
• Flare-ups that started this season and will not settle down, on a grill you clean the same as always.

Do the burners at the same time or not

If the bars have been holed for a while, look at the burner tubes underneath before you close it up. Grease that dripped straight onto a tube tends to eat the top row of ports, and a tube with the top ports gone will burn unevenly no matter what you put above it.

Fresh bars over a corroded tube is a half repair. Fresh bars over a sound tube is the whole repair, and the difference is a two minute look while the cookbox is already open.

Getting the size right

Measure the old bar tip to tip, including the tabs that hook over the frame, then measure across the open bottom. Count how many the grill takes, because they are usually sold in sets sized to a specific cookbox.

If the old bars are too far gone to measure, the model number stamped on the plate under the lid or behind the cart door will do it. Our replacement part listings name the models each set fits, and the numbers on those lists come from the hardware itself.