New Dehydrator ='s a Wonderful Day

A few weeks ago, my last dehydrator decided it had given its last heat. The fan still worked but no heat makes the fan fairly useless. The saddest part is I have about 4 non-working dehydrators in my garage because I have burned them out in the past year. As you can see from my past posts on dehydration, I dehydrate most anything. If you type dehydrated into my search at the bottom of the page, many posts will come up.

Because of this, I go through lots of dehydrators as I use them weekly. I keep them once they burn out for the trays. To buy new trays for a dehydrator runs about $10 - $12 a tray. If you buy the inserts for smaller fruit or for fruit leather you can add anther $2-$4 each.

My favorite dehydrators have been the Vita-Mix and the American Harvest. American Harvest is now Nesco. I have tried probably most of the dehydrators out. I don't like the trays so much on the harvest master but I like the way they dehydrate. The fruit is soft even when dry and doesn't usually brown.

I liked the trays on the Vita-Mix and I like the way they wash. However, American Harvest /Nesco is sold locally and I have 8 trays already from my last dehydrator along with the mesh and fruit roll-up inserts and a cover so I went to the local Ace Hardware store to check prices. I was surprised when the local store had them at half the price on Amazon or from a direct distributor. The Garden Master Dehydrator I purchased was $90 and the same one on any site I checked online was over $140. Here is a link to the one I bought.

It has a digital readout and a timer so if I have to leave, I can set the timer to shut it off. Just a month or so ago, I was in a hurry and left my dehydrator on when I left and had to call someone to come in and unplug it while I was away.

I took in the trays from my large American Harvest and one of the small trays from my other American Harvest and they both fit the units on sale. That meant I had 12 trays for the large 1,000 watt machine. If you are thinking of buying this unit be sure you get the top mount and not the bottom mount. The bottom motor unit has heat coils and can dry up to 30 trays at a time. However, if juice drips down, the unit can sizzle and burn out the heat unit faster

This is the reason I wanted the top mounted heater/fan. I called the company about fixing the old units I have and they said they fix anything for $10 but you have to pay shipping both ways. It would cost me $30 - $40 to do that. I got a new unit that fits all my trays for $90. By buying the new unit I got 4 more trays which added to the fixing cost, it would have cost me the same to buy 4 trays and fix the unit so it only made sense to buy a new unit as there is no guarantee on a fixed unit but there is on a new unit.

Be careful when buying this if you choose to buy it because the bottom mount and the top mount have the same sku number and I looked at the top mount heat unit with the digital timer on the shelf and it said "Garden Master" so I found a box on the shelf that said, "Garden Master 1,000" watt and bought it. When I got home and took it out of the box, it was a bottom mount. When I took it back to exchange it, they only top mount they had was the display unit. I bought it and when they scanned the boxes, they came up the same.

The top units cost the store more than the bottom units so that is why they had more of the bottom mount even though they were selling them for the same price.

I have been using it for a few days now and so far so good. I'll share a bit more tomorrow about what I have been doing.