Chips – Wood chips are often purchased, and used handfuls at a time. I really don’t recommend using them for cooking barbecue. The reason is they burn way to fast, before getting any real benefit from them. The best use for wood chips is for adding smoke flavor while grilling, where you would add them to a tray, wrapped in foil, or directly over hot coals.

Chunks – If you’re cooking barbecue, and using charcoal as your heat source, then wood chunks would be my choice, and it should be yours also. Wood chunks are big enough to give smoke for a period of time, and if mixed into your charcoal, should last. One thing to make note of is, if you will be wrapping your meat at any point during the cook, I recommend adding chunks as you go, rather than mixing them into your charcoal. You don’t want to be wasting wood chunks, when your meat is wrapped in foil.

Sticks – Can also refer to split logs, so we can obviously be talking a wide range in size and thickness. If they are thin sticks, you can certainly use them like chunks in the smaller cookers. But if you have split logs, then you need to save these for when you are using a large cooker, fireplace, or camp fire. Do not attempt to use split logs in charcoal cookers. You will ruin your cooker, and over smoke your meat. Split logs need a large area for clean combustion.

Pellets – Pellets are mostly used as a fuel source in pellet cookers however, it is getting increasingly popular to use wood pellets in varying flavors, to flavor meats on charcoal cookers, and gas grills.