And I like the H2O solids to liquids portion of the chart.
Shows well what we who do natural observations have seem many times.
Ice cubes in a tray after many months shrinking smaller.
Foods in a deep freeze after years shrinking, taste changing, “freezer-burning”.
What this two factor chart lacks are the important factors of Time and Air-Circulation factors.
Time is the important one for effective usable foods vacuum freeze drying.
Air (&and lowered humidity) Circulation factor is referred to by both Tone and Kristijan.
You do see this a lot out in in the the real world at high latitudes and high altitudes conditions.
Lots of lower pressure, and low humidity, winds.
This is from the “Phil at 4800” ( feet altitude?) YouTube’s channel recommended by Dean Lasko:
Listen to their monthly sales and see many are interested enough to be spending these investments in foods security. And all of this developing since 2012.
Regards
Steve Unruh
Hey Tom the batch’s take prob 20 to 30 hrs depending on what it is, I don’t have a meter to measure but most of the guys who have you tube channels do keep track and I think I remember seeing that it’s prob about 25 kWh average per batch.
If I remember correctly, average time 30 hrs. When I did the math, electric here was 9 cents kw it work out to be 2.50-4.00 per batch. I may buy a meter to test.
Hey Chris I think saying freeze dried fruit is bad might not be true, I’ve done peaches, plums, bananas, grapes, apples and pineapples and they are very good as a snack, one of the reasons I got the freeze dryer was to give my grand kids healthier snacks than candies ,most of the freeze drying sites claim they are way healthier than candies,I don’t think they get more sugar after drying than they had before, unless you eat more than you would fresh ones they have same benefits as fresh because freeze drying loses very little nutrients, not like dehydration.I prob watched 100 videos and researched 100 hrs before I spent the money on a freeze drier.
Maybe but I can eat a whole banana or peach but it’s hard to eat that many pieces of freeze dried fruit cause it’s more tart and dryer but maybe some people could.
Good article and confirmed what I thought just like Kristijan said.
I think some fruits more than others would be easy to overconsume, for me that would be small fruits like raspberries, strawberries and such.
How does freezedried whole fruits and berries react if you were to try to rehydrate them again, is that possible with a reasonable good result?
Since on the topic. My stove is designed for 2/3 of the cooking surface to be excluded from flame in summer but it still gets a bit warm. Ideal for drying. Its drying something preety much all the time.
Mushrooms mainly. Funny, I never liked them much, only picked a few each year for spice powder. I have since learnt the incredible benefits of the fungal world and started using them extensively. Sun dryed mushrooms are one of the best vitamin D sorces in winter. Suposedly, just 15min of sun exposure is enaugh to form vitamine D in them, then you can finish them in the dedidrator. I leave them for a few hours.
Golden chenterells drying at the moment…
it is amazing to me that we live half a world away from each other, vast oceans between on sperate continents, yet our climates support the same fungal growth. chants are just starting to pop up around here, need a good rain to get them stirred up and moving. then the coral mushrooms will pop as well. still have some dehydrated chants from last year sitting, i like to add them into stews myself
It gets better. Not only that, but visiting the US was almost a surreal experiance. Like entering a nother paralell universe where everything is the same but just slightly different. People are the same but speak different, food is the same but tastes different, woods are the same but just each tree species a tiny bit different, deer are the same just a bit bigger, hell even the exhaust on cars smells different! But under the line its preety much all the same.
Dean’s and Al’s numbers agree pretty well with our experience. The freeze-drier uses more power than our dehydrators, but seems to hold a little more food. The freeze-dried product is better in most respects, the exception being storage volume. Freeze-dried milk and eggs are particularly convenient and tasty. We’ve done a lot of chicken, cooked and diced. We use a lot of chicken, and with it pre-cooked, meals go together easily. The consistency is interesting. If you pop some in your mouth, it will crunch and chew quickly and easily like chips. If you “suck” on it and let it rehydrate some, it chews like meat.
I’m impressed that anyone would try to do a consumer freeze drier, but Harvest Right has actually pulled it off. The cost of a freeze-drier will buy you a good dehydrator and a LOT of food. To be honest, I’d always wanted a freeze-drier (actually have a scrounged lab unit that works, but has to be baby-sat and processes very small amounts), so when my beautiful wife suggested buying one, I left the pencil in the drawer and went for the long storage life and product quality
12 Likes
Marat_Lysenko
(Marat (East of Ukraine, 70 km from Donetsk))
#32
Since a freeze dryer consumes a lot of energy over many hours, it is an excellent addition to a wood gas generator and mini-CHP. For example, you can try to make a vacuum pump from an air conditioning compressor; you can connect it through a belt to the internal combustion engine. It has a disengageable clutch. You just need to solve the issue of oil circulation through it.
Warm. Flammable gas. Electricity. Vacuum. A very useful set for life!
You can collect and replace the oil, but for a freeze drier you will have a lot of condensed water to deal with. If you can find an older, belt driven vacuum pump with gas ballast, you will not spend so much time filtering and separating water from oil. Gas ballast vents ambient air into the pump chamber after the inlet has been cut off by the rotating vanes. You will still collect water, and change oil, but much less frequently.
I wonder how keeping the pump and oil hot wuld help this problem…
I have been thinking how to implement a Sprengel pump for the job… they are crazy efficiant and also achive incredible vacuums. problem is the mercury. Galium culd potentialy be used but still too expensive and exotic. Its also “sticky”. But tin with a melting point of 230c… and being relatively cheap and non toxic… dont know. Maybee lm just crazy
Hmm did a calculation, to extract 1 mol of water (18g) at triple point vacuum one needs to extract 7m3 of vapour… l imagined it being a lot but not that much…
2 Likes
Marat_Lysenko
(Marat (East of Ukraine, 70 km from Donetsk))
#36
This is my homemade air compressor. This is a 2-piston compressor from the Soviet and now Ukrainian tractor T-150. It is driven by a 4 kW electric motor through a 5.5 kW frequency converter.
The lubrication system is based on a power steering pump from some foreign car. Its drive is an electric motor at the bottom, with a power of about 500W, also through a separate frequency converter. It’s just that the frequency converter was available, but the pressure reducing valve was not at hand. I recently found information on how to reconfigure the bypass valve built into the power steering pump, but have not tried it yet.
This scary monster is used both as a source of compressed air and as a vacuum pump for a homemade goat milking machine.
In vacuum pump mode, it consumes a lot of oil and then has to be drained from the receiver. When mixed with water, the oil looks like liquid mayonnaise. But the compressor has been operating on this emulsion for several years. I rarely change to pure oil.
The compressor cylinders are also cooled with oil.
The task of returning oil to the compressor is becoming more and more interesting every day: I want to put 3 car air conditioning compressors on a car with firewood. 1st for obtain compressed air for inflating tires and driving pneumatic cylinders for gear shifting and clutch release. 2nd compressor for the air conditioning system in the cabin of the same car. And the 3rd compressor - for pumping wood gas into a propane cylinder, to instantly start the machine even before the wood gas generator warms up, to start the wood gas generator, to maintain the reaction and good composition of the gas with low or even zero consumption of wood gas.
AC and woodgas compression make sence but gear shifting and clutch??? Are you making a self driving car?
Marat_Lysenko
(Marat (East of Ukraine, 70 km from Donetsk))
#38
No, but I’ve been wanting to make my own robotic gearbox for a long time. It’s just that the prepared pneumatic cylinders and pneumatic distributors for converting a manual transmission into a robotic one have been lying around for a long time.
And for our all-wheel drive SUV, which we assemble part by part, the parts (link) for gear shifting and clutch release (hydraulic cylinders) are too expensive. Besides, it’s interesting to try to do something that the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant never did!
There isn’t as much mechanical work as there is more microcontroller programming. And this trains the inevitably aging brain.
Well, and the consciousness of one’s own importance, as Dale Carnegie talked about it.
Vacuum pumps tend to run hot if they’re moving very much gas—compression heating. Once warmed up, this helps keep water vapor moving. But some almost invariably condenses. Heating would help, until the oil begins to break down.
I have been thinking how to implement a Sprengel pump for the job… they are crazy efficiant and also achive incredible vacuums. problem is the mercury. Galium culd potentialy be used but still too expensive and exotic. Its also “sticky”. But tin with a melting point of 230c… and being relatively cheap and non toxic… dont know. Maybee lm just crazy
Sprengel pumps are interesting, especially when you need to pump a small amount of gas over a longer period. Nice and quiet. I’d like to try running several in series, with water as the working fluid, to get the vacuum with a reasonable tube height. Might work? Some day, when I have time maybe I’ll try it. For this, heat is not your friend. But then, water vapor isn’t either. The tricky part is dealing with water vapor backstreaming from the pump working fluid.
I’m thinking a Sprengel pump would have to be huge to get close to this flow. I think the consumer freeze driers use 6 cubic feet per minute pumps, so just looking at the energy to do the work, it would take a lot of falling water (or mercury).
