I'm considering getting one for three reasons. First, with just the wife and I we always have leftovers I could process and eat later. Second, living In hurricane territory I always keep a stash of food for emergencies. Third, freeze dried food is expensive.

So who has one? Can you share your experiences with it? If the end of the world comes in my lifetime I want to eat well before I die.

We have one. Game changer for preparedness and food storage.

Interested in any responses here. I would love to get one of these, but they are a chunk of change and I just don't think I would use it enough to justify the expense.

Then don’t you also need a good chamber vac sealer. Another good size expense. I just looked at one the other day at the Fleet Farm think it was almost $3400. I would say invest in a good chamber vac sealer that’s all most people need. Leftovers sealed in a chamber vac and stored in the freezer will last up to two years. If you live in hurricane country you should already have a generator to run most your critical appliances anyhow.

quote:

Originally posted by lastmanstanding:
Then don’t you also need a good chamber vac sealer. Another good size expense. I just looked at one the other day at the Fleet Farm think it was almost $3400. I would say invest in a good chamber vac sealer that’s all most people need. Leftovers sealed in a chamber vac and stored in the freezer will last up to two years. If you live in hurricane country you should already have a generator to run most your critical appliances anyhow.

I want longer life than two years, I've had to purge my stash a couple times already due to expired food.

I've watched them go up in price 30% in the past 2 years.

In the long game, it'll pencil for those serious about putting food up or those who use this type of meal prep on a regular basis. I have a friend who is determined to get into the fancy hiking food business to pay for his.

From what I gather listening to his plans, it pays to upgrade to higher quality parts that the stock options.

My wife really wanted one till.......1700w @ 24-48hrs, cant do that on solar power.

I would consider a Ridgeline

quote:

Originally posted by mrvmax:

quote:

Originally posted by lastmanstanding:
Then don’t you also need a good chamber vac sealer. Another good size expense. I just looked at one the other day at the Fleet Farm think it was almost $3400. I would say invest in a good chamber vac sealer that’s all most people need. Leftovers sealed in a chamber vac and stored in the freezer will last up to two years. If you live in hurricane country you should already have a generator to run most your critical appliances anyhow.

I want longer life than two years, I've had to purge my stash a couple times already due to expired food.

You can buy a hell of a lot of freeze dried food for the price of the equipment you need to buy and run it. As you said it's just you and your wife how much do you need stored or what exactly are you prepping for? If you vac seal your left overs eat them as you go and replace with new leftovers you should be fine. I may not just be understanding your application.

Simply as a replacement for purchasing freeze dried emergency supplies, a freeze dryer may only make sense in the long run. Still, suppose your freezer is full and you're looking at preserving food.

Canning can be good for some foods and soon you'll have a food pantry with lots of jars. Some foods turn to mush in a pressure canner, though. A dehydrator can work for some things but there can be issues with it as well. Canning, dehydrating, and fermented vegetables might be sufficient for many.

A freeze dryer can provide convenience in that a lot of food that would turn to mush when canned turn out great. Long term storage and nutrition quality of freeze dried foods is hard to beat, especially if you know exactly what's in it. If you run across great deals on foods and take advantage of them to freeze dry batches to enjoy across a year or more, that can make sense as well. It could even be a type of inflation hedge where you buy food when it's cheaper and use it when it's more expensive or unavailable.

Does all that mean a freeze dryer is worth the price? That depends entirely on how one uses it and the value they place on what it does for them.

quote:

Originally posted by old rugged cross:
I would consider a Ridgeline

Now that there was funny. Gave me a good laugh.

These are the reasons the expense made sense to us. We wanted enough freeze dried food to feed (at the time) 8 people for three years if need be. Now with marriages and more grand children it's 15 people we would need to feed. There is simply no more efficient way of storing food than freeze drying. Buying that much food from a commercial provider would be really expensive and when you read the calorie content, it's not as nutritious as one might think. The other thought is that the variety is narrow and it's someone else's recipe so maybe not so enjoyable. I suspect that if the food storage is needed, conditions might be that comforting food of your own would be nice.

Anyway, freeze dried food stores and moves far easier than buckets of wheat or canned/bottled food. It is not vulnerable to breakage or basement floods and weighs so little that taking it with you is not a chore. The most important thing to us is that we freeze dry complete meals. In a catastrophic event or extended period of social collapse, finding and preparing food seems like it would take most of our time so other things that need our attention get neglected. Meals ready made take not much time or effort to reconstitute and consume.

Some may think they'll just plant a garden and eat that way. That is a solution, but one crop failure or lack of the skills to plant, cultivate, harvest etc. could be fatal. It is a plan but it's risky. We still intend to work our garden but even as large as it is and as experienced as we are at producing food, we know it is only supplemental. Freeze dried and stable food put away is money in the bank. Parenthetically, if your plan is to go in the woods and hunt, you'll be in competition with thousands of fellow citizens. I expect in general collapse, game will be wiped out for miles into the woods; not to mention the ammo necessary to hunt will get scarce pretty quickly too. You'll be reduced to eating Fido, Spot and Fluffy before long. Also, processing and storing meat without basic services is time consuming and vulnerable potentially.

We've had our freeze dryer for seems like five years now. It changed the nature of our garden harvest from a chore that took weeks of tedious and sometimes dreadful labor to a process that a machine does mostly. The thing is running much of the the time all year around. At this point, we have two full bedrooms stacked floor to ceiling and wall to wall with boxes full of meals ready to reconstitute. Same goes for the mezzanine in my shop. We have come so see that there has never been a cheaper easier way to acquire food and process it for storage than at this time in history.

last thing, take some time and learn how to reconstitute your food. Each item category will have a different process we've found. Write the process on the box or somewhere so it can be referenced later. We've reconstituted and eaten some of our food. It is hard to believe it's stored food. Although some things do no reconstitute perfectly, the taste is remarkable.....assuming you can cook. lol