Solar Food Dehydrators
Preserve your Garden Harvest with the Sun
Once you start gardening, the issue becomes how to save your delicious harvest so that you can enjoy it all. One method that is very useful is dehydrating or drying your fruits and vegetables. Instead of having food drying come down to one more appliance that uses electricity, why not try making your own solar dehydrator?
Drying food is one of the oldest ways of preserving the harvest, and it's a method that lets you save the food without using a constant flow of electricity (like freezing). Some dried foods can be eaten as-is after dehydrating but many are soaked in water again to improve their texture and flavor before cooking. Dehydrated veggies are great in soups and stews in the winter, allowing for summer flavors and nutrients to be kept in the diet year-round.
Food Drying Without Electricity
We used to have an electric food dehydrator in the house. It was great for saving food from the garden and it made making your own camping meals really easy, but the housemate who owned it moved out, so that was the end of the electric dehydrator.
Since we'd love to still be able to dry foodstuffs, but would like to reduce the amount of electrical appliances we use in the kitchen, I thought making a solar food dehydrator would be a great option. With the right plans, lots of recycled materials can be used and in the summertime, the power is about as cheap and abundant as you could want.
We don't have a lot of room, so building a taller and more narrow one with several shelves will probably be the overall shape we develop. One of our biggest uses is going to be for herbs we grow, followed by vegetables that get harvested in the fall. I sure wouldn't mind making my own sun-dried tomatoes instead of buying them.
THE SOLAR FOOD DRYER by Eben V. Fodor
DIY Solar Food Dehydrators
- SOLAR DEHYDRATOR
Made from two cardboard boxes, some clear plastic wrap, and a little tape. You can build a nearly free solar dehydrator. Set it on a stool or chair and face it's solar collector towards the sun, and you have a functional food preservation machine for - Chris's ENGR305 Solar Food Dehydrator - Appropedia: The sustainability wiki
The idea of creating a hybrid, solar food dehydrator, that also adhered to as many of the principles of modern food dehydration as possible sounded excellent to me. The potential of using this old system in new ways can save both power and materials. - A Review of Solar Food Drying (The Solar Cooking Archive)
Food drying is a very simple, ancient skill. It requires a safe place to spread the food where dry air in large quantities can pass over and beside thin pieces. Sun is often used to provide the hot dry air. Dry, clean air including dry cold air from - Solar Food Drying
Lots of variations for building solar food dryers.
Take a Look at a Solar Dehydrator
What If You Don't Have Enough Sun? - an option for those who can't solar dry food
DIY Dehydrator PDFs
Here are links to PDFs on the web that are about how to build your own solar food dehydrator. If you click on these, it will start a download of a document to your computer.
- Hardcore solar dehydrator
This site makes available 8 1/2" x 11" conceptual plans that can be helpful in developing building layouts and selecting equipment for various agricultural applications. - Making New Dryer Screens
How to build dryer screens for your solar dehydrator using window screen frames.
If you're working on your own solar dryer, let us know how it's going! If you've had problems, let us know what they were and how you worked them out!
