The Solar Food Dryer: How to Make and Use Your Own Low-Cost, High Performance, Sun-Powered Food Dehydrator
Product Description
The Solar Food Dryer describes how to use solar energy to dry your food instead of costly electricity. With your own solar-powered food dryer, you can quickly and efficiently dry all your extra garden veggies, fruits, and herbs to preserve their goodness all year long-with free sunshine! Applicable to a wide geography-wherever gardens grow-this well-illustrated book includes:
Complete step-by-step plans for building a high-performance, low-cost solar food dryer from readily available materials
Solar energy design concepts
Food drying tips and recipes
Resources, references, solar charts, and more
Eben Fodor is an organic gardener with a background in solar energy and engineering. He works as a community planning consultant in Eugene, Oregon.
Product Features
A lot of useful information. It does not address whether the solar dehydrators are more effective in humid areas of the country. The plan gives him a shot to see how it works.
The book is short and easy to read. I am an engineer and designs are good, but I feel that there may be some general improvements necessarly not only to design but to consrtuction. I plan to draft a set of working drawings of my ideas on a "Throw-away" the sample prior to the actual building work dryer. I have all types of scrap in the shop to do it, it will not last long in the sun all day. I can save a little for food free from the local market because this is the last sale of quality. I am very happy with the book and plan to read it again.
The book explains how and why solar drying. I was thinking about how much dry product / herbs each summer with electric dryers which are costly at this time. Solar dryers are shown in this book is for someone who dry small amounts at a time, but I have no idea and can build units (units) that could dry the amount of product and process each year.
I do not necessarily agree that the drier the food in this book is the most optimal design. Creating a hot plate, and then layers of shading to the fruit seems to be less than optimal for me. I am going to build similar to the food dryer Mexican described in the book. But this is obviously a personal choice. The book is in great detail how the proposed fruit dryer. If you are not the type of person handy, I guess you can still do it. For me personally it is too much detail. I like to work with the picture, but only to my needs, I do not like all the strict guidelines. But the book is very helpful in explaining to all and in the drying out of food. The basic principles, as a result of the different angles with respect to the rays of the sun, the effect where you are in the world in relation to the rays of the sun's strength, and temperature through the vents, etc. As a result, the book taught me a lot more and I would like to imagine and gave me the basic knowledge to create a decent Sunday powered food dryer, and therefore I consider this book as a very good buy.
If any type of home, preserving, growing their own food, etc., is absolutely needed to get this book! This will give you cheap and realistic way to preserve the natural and food in such a way that maintains tasting great! Step-by-step instructions for building food dryer is the author of superior and easy to use, even in the absence of mechanically inclined. My only wish is that the author had included plans for the other foodstuffs listed drier, although a quick Google of that supply, so this is not really necessary.