I had this grill for a couple months and at first it worked flawlessly.  I cleaned it after every cook, but started getting large amounts of backburn into the pellet hopper.  This got bad enough that I thought it was going to be dangerous.  Over time the problem kept getting worse.  The only way to remove the pellets is manually scoop them out or turn the grill upside down.  I liked the portability, but can't deal with the backburn issue.  I have found this to be a problem with other portable pellet grills as well.  In my opinion the distance from the burnpot through the auger to the pellet hopper is too short and this type of problem is inevitable.  I have had no such problems with my Ironwood 885.  I think Traeger needs to make some engineering changes to this model.