Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire We bought a freeze dryer

I bought my wife some freeze dried skittles from a coworker. My wife loved them.

Aaaaaaand now we have a freeze dryer.

I have been looking at them
The cost right now is what is stopping me
Let us know how it works for ya.

Just got the test run done. -50f in a few minutes. Vac pump (premiere) is very quiet. Should be making her happy by sundown.

Details please.

Damn that was easy

I’m gonna try it 😀

Just got a Harvest Right, as well (medium size).

Yet to do the maiden voyage.

Friend of mine has one. You couldn't run fast enough to give me one. We do a lot of food preservation but almost everything I have had out of his freeze dryer I wouldn't eat unless it was an end of the world life or death situation. Takes a lot of power and and a lot of time to freeze dry things.

Can’t even eat fresh skittles.

Mrs slumlord would shuck out the bucks for some freeze dried caramel popcorn

That’s how I’ll do it

We bought the large with premier pump. I typically consume about $500 worth of mtn house between camping and hunting....Hopefully my wife can nail down the perfect recipes.

They have a small one for $2600 at the local ranch store, I keep looking but have no idea how well they work.

They rock. We’ve had one for a year. You can freeze dry beer. Nuff said.

RockChuck has one of those. Last year he gave me some tomatoes and fruit he had done. They were really good.

HarvestRight is the only US company that makes home sized ones. They aren't cheap, that's for sure. We got ours about a year ago and have done quite a bit with it.
I don't recommend you buy bags from them. They don't have a bellows bottom and won't hold very much. Plus, you pay extra for all the fancy printing they put on them. You can find mylar bags for much less online.

Here's something to try - tomatoes. Dry them sliced about 1" thick, then grind them to a powder for storage. You can get a bushel of tomatoes in a couple quart jars that way, just by getting rid of the air. You can use them in recipes or just sprinkle the powder on stuff. It'll have all the same taste.
WARNING: dried tomatoes will attract moisture immediately after they come out of the drier. Be ready to bag or grind them right away or they'll start to get sticky from moisture. You really don't want to leave them out overnight.

Energy Consumption is what I am concerned about.
In the future I will be using it Off Grid from Solar Panels and Batteries
The Panels I can add as needed. The Batteries I can Not easily add and I really do not want to run a generator all night long during the Cycles of the Freeze Dryer.

I just thought of an amazing Christmas present for my bride.

A drier will use between 1000 and 1200 watts/hr depending on a number of variables. Most things take about 48 hrs to dry but some will take considerably longer if they have a high water content. You can shorten the freezing cycle by 5 or 6 hours by pre-freezing the stuff in your home freezer. We do that all the time. With tomatoes, for example, we'll slice and freeze them in cheap foil pans. We can then store them frozen in grocery bags and freeze dry them as time allows. We do a lot of fruits that way. It can takes weeks of freeze drier time to dry a bushel of peaches, for example. We just slice and freeze them and then dry them a batch at a time.
We did a couple batches of blackberries a while back. Those things took forever, something like 90 hours. They just have so much water in them.

Kiwis and honeydew mellons are about the best things we have done so far. Hatch chilies are great but it takes three batches of skittles to get the hotness out of the machine. Watermelon is very good but it takes a long time.

It takes a lot of freeze-drying to break-even on costs over time but .... it eventually happens if you do enough of it and the machine doesn't break-down. (Oiless pumps have made them better over the years.)

Costs:

Home grown veggies and meats or/either storebought or farmer's market veggies and meats.

Plow/tiller, gas and oil, fertilizer, seeds, feed, time and effort.

Our power bill increased (between 2018, 2019 and 2020 year over year in harvest months, garden and hunting, about 110% when I was running a batch a day in July, August, September, October, November and December.

Cost of the machine itself.

Figure you prorate the machine over five years through depreciation. Roughly $1100 for five years (oil free large).

Another couple of grand a year to feed it (we dehydrate everything from scrambled eggs to elk and everything inbetween.)

Figure, here in the south where we have mild winters and four or five growing seasons per year ... you'll double your power bill but let's say $200 a month to run the Harvest Right.

Over five years with a large oil free, $1100 a month plus $200 a month to feed it plus $200 a month in power consumption .... $1500 a year over five years not counting mylar and buckets and O² absorbers ... you know what, figure $1600 a year minimum not counting time and effort.

That's $8000 investment over five years minimum .... and $8000 will buy you a lot of Mountain House, pallets of Emegency Essentials.

We still love ours, it affords-us a lot of freedom and independence. (We still buy Morning Moo but we have freeze dried buckets of just about anything and everything else.)

Just understand going-in ... it becomes an obsession. I ended-up doing a special canning and freeze drying room in the barn just to get ours out of the kitchen and running all night.

Word to the wise .... keep the pieces of meat small going-in. The smaller the better. Cut veggies thick. Scramble eggs and pour them deep on the tray, uncooked. Premix salt and pepper. Ice cream sandwiches are the bomb. Don't waste your time on legumes. Do cheese but powder it. Milk is a waste of time and cheaper to buy (Morning Moo). Greasy things (like chocolate) do not do well.

Lots of other things, other than food, can be freeze-dried btw.

I'm partial to freeze dried cheese for popcorn. Rhubarb is good also