Freeze dryers are just beginning to be sold here, and there are not many takers because of the price. Second hand isn't looking like a option.
They are so expensive, that I am not entirely sure it's good thing to buy from a cost effective point of view.
What size do you all have and recommend? Is a large hard to fill with stuff? I won't be doing treat kind of stuff, just basic foods like meat, fruit and veggies. I have nine large freezers, dehydrated and canned stuff. I need to go another route and try to reduce some of that down.
When we purchased ours, there was only one size option, which they now consider a medium size. Now Harvest Right sells Large, Medium and Small units. From your description, a large may be advantageous for you. A medium is roughly 1/5 smaller than the large size. If you look at a freeze drier in terms of a long term investment, both in equipment but also in terms of being able to preserve food without additional electricity for long term. With 9 freezers, I am sure you are using a fair amount of juice every day to keep them going, we have 2 deep freezes and an upright and I know they add $20 to $30 to our electric bill each month.
When drying even the wettest of foods, a freeze drier may take 2 to 3 days to complete, but that is $2-4 in energy used up front, then none after that.
Are you cooking the meat first and can whole chicken breasts ect be done without slicing? I have six hundred lbs of chicken parts and the thought of precooking all of it in some form or other, is making me feel really lazy. Then there is all the rest of it. I need a shove.
You can do it either way, either raw or cooked. We do both. There are times when it is more convenient to dry ingredients raw and other times where we it is just as easy to do it cooked, usually because we are already cooking that food for supper, so we will just double or triple the batch. As far as the chicken breasts go, they can't be too thick. 10mm or 3/8 inch is the thickest that HR recommends, so if they are no thicker than that, then you don't have to slice them, but if they are thicker, you'll have to, as they won't dry completely if they are too thick.
Do you find your freeze dryer to be energy efficient? I am going to buy one here probably this month myself and the Harvest Right is the one I have chosen also. I value your opinion.
From my experience, they are not terribly inefficient. You can cut down on cycle time by prefreezing your food on the trays, which will help reduce the amount of power the freeze drier uses. I am in agreement with
@Amish Heart it comes out to roughly $1 a day. One thing I do try to do as well is use the freeze drier more in the winter time, as ours in a storage area of the house that we keep minimally climate controlled. By running the machine in the cooler temps during the winter, it runs more efficiently and doesn't take as long to complete a cycle compared to during the warmer months. Granted, when the harvest is ready in the garden, there is no waiting for cooler weather to dry it, but on some things we try and wait until the cooler months to do so.
