"I bought a Harvest Right home freeze dryer." A saga.

The garlic finished yesterday, it looks almost like it's still fresh. I managed to fill a small bag to the absolute brim which might prove to be a mistake when all I need is a clove's worth. It's fine. If I do need to use it I can either close the bag up and re-seal it with the impulse sealer or put it into mason jars using the handheld, battery powered vacuum sealer. That can be easily charged with solar so it's going to be useable in almost all situations.



And then the other product that we processed at the same time was a whole heap of green chillis and a few red chillis that the in-laws brought over. Hubby was going to make some chilli jam with it but we still have a huge jar of his last batch so he decided to ask me to FD it instead. He blended it up, and maced himself 🤣. The I FD'd it, and broke it up into large pieces to put into a bag. All the while, macing myself 🤣🤣🤣. We all know that cooking with chilli can cause a lot of tears and coughing but when it gets powdered and floats into your face when you puff the oxygen out of a bag? Phwar! I coughed so hard I gave myself a headache. 
Probably also laughing really hard the whole time didn't help. We'll never know. Lmao.



Interestingly, the chilli came out cloud-like in the tray. I expected it to crumble as I cut into it with the scraper, but it almost floofed into nothingness. It would have powdered extremely easily in the vitamix but I was NOT going to risk that level of chilli in the air when I opened it. And you really can't leave it sitting in the blender for a long time to settle because it will absorb the ambient moisture in the air in the jug even faster than when it's in a pre-powdered form. So I put chunks of it into the bag very delicately but it did still release a lot of chilli into the air. 

New experiments/lessons this week: 

I've been doing some research on fat in FD'd food. The vast majority of the community accepts it as a given that you simply cannot store fatty foods long term because the fat will oxidise and go rancid quickly.

I found a channel called SchoolReports, and the gentleman made a video about how he questions that concept. He mentions that Mountain House has meals that are up to 30% saturated fat in content, and they guarantee their meals for 30 years. He said that the use of rosemary as an antioxidant does help and that's why there's a lot of meals with rosemary in them, but he then pointed out that there's a newer company called Freeze Dry Wholesalers who create single item food items like sirloin steak. 
When you look at the pictures, they clearly indicate a good amount of fat on the meats. That company guarantees ten years. Their ingredient list for each item says the item it is and nothing more. Ie. Sirloin steak is Sirloin steak. No added antioxidants. No added preservatives.

Now the gent from SchoolReports says that the storage of fat hinges entirely on the product being guaranteed dry. I would imagine that even the smallest amount of moisture in fat is where people go wrong. But just like the 'FDing is nutritionally better than any other form of FDing" it's hard to find information that says that fat is harder to store than regular macros that isn't written in industry gibberish. The layman finds it hard to understand (it's me, I'm the layman! lol) so the accepted standard to parrot is to just not do it.
Sure. If you want to guarantee your food for 30 years then it's probably a good practice to follow. But I don't think I'll have any food in storage for 30 years. Whether it's our home pantry, long term food storage pantry, or SHTF food storage, we like to rotate our foods so that they have the best chance of being as fresh as possible when we really need them.

And given how essential fats are to the human body I think it's a risk worth taking. To try to have fats available when you need them means processing animal fats, seed and nut oils and the like. The assumption is that you won't have any access to either of those things, or whatever is required to process them. Having all of the essentials to keep us going until the coast is clear is the main goal and that means finding a method of storage for fats as well. If we only get ten years out of stored fat that's still better than the 1-2 years max we'd get out of a bottle of olive oil.

I cook with Avocado oil and it has a lot longer shelf life than other oils. I wonder if the higher the smoke-point of oils the longer the shelf life?

It's great on a BBQ...you dont seem to be cleaning the grill grates all the time and you dont seem to get that nasty, carcinogenic, crusty burnt fat build-up as well. Not perfect of course, you have to keep on top of it but doesn't seem to be as bad when BBQ/grilling with other fats.

No pics today because I'm feeling lazy 😅. I've made the exec decision to FD some of the beans and rice that I have in storage. The 'use by' date is Jan 23 for some of the beans but as we all know they'll store MUCH longer than that. 25 odd years or so. And even then, they just get a bit harder to cook. But I like to rotate my stock so that I always have the freshest possible so I figured if I cook some of them up and FD them I'll make some meals that are easier to make in a hurry. Boiling water and 10 minutes of resting time vs. overnight soak and 40-60 minutes of active cooking is a good trade off.
So I made up a batch of smokey black beans and rice in the slow cooker and put those through.

The machine conked out because the power cut briefly. Too much load on one part of the system in the house conks out ALL of the power and we were running the microwave, kettle, and air fryer all at once lol. So I had to restart the cycle but it was easy enough to do.

I put a load of cheesecake bites through, a lot of groups say that it's an amazing tasty treat and I thought heck it, why not. We had left overs so I've put them in. But not enough for a full batch so I put a tray of medjool dates through as an experiment. That might end badly. They're full of sugar so it could end up in a sugar-splosion. But I figure you have to have fun with it every now and then and if I can make date sugar by FDing dates then why not.

You're not wrong! It's thankfully only happened a couple of times so it's definitely not something I'll get my knickers in a knot about.

I just checked the dates. They have about 12 hours to go because I always add extra dry time to be sure that it is really ready. But a couple sugars bubbled up on the top, and the rest are lightly granulated on them. They look great, but more importantly they don't look like they're going to explode.

Side note, my whole garage smells of cheesecake and medjool dates and I am NOT mad about it. I think my mother-in-law will be particularly pleased with the idea of the dates, she loves them just to snack on so dried wedges of them will probably make her day. Obviously they're just as 'unhealthy' as any other sweet treat but with the nutrients in them they'll make for a particularly nutritious sweet treat.

I am so blessed that we are all here of the same mindset, prepping and laying in food, canning, growing, being independent from the masses in water, food, comms, power etc.

Its a food feeling eh stealth ?




How many times do we have to tell you to not divide by zero?

Time for an update, because I found my first real hurdle!

There's a lot of complaints in Harvest Right's FB page about defective machines. I thought I was one of the lucky ones with one small problem early on (a demister with a broken thread) that was pretty easily fixed. That raised my confidence a little. It seems, somewhat erroneously 🤣.

I posted a few days ago that I was having trouble with our machine tripping the power. We had a sparkie come out and look at what was going on, and he determined that the FDer was likely not earthed properly and was causing the RCD to instantly fritz when the machine turned on. We had him install another dedicated circuit to run the machine off so that if it tripped the RCD it would only effect that circuit. He had a quick look at the machine at the time and said that he couldn't do any work on it as he's not registered as an appliance tech. Anything that he did wouldn't be covered by insurance if he made a mistake. Fair enough.

So began the saga of calling around to find someone that COULD work on it.

The first local mob I called initially said they couldn't even look at it because it came from America. I explained that it was specifically wired for the Australian electrical system, for Australian use, and the receptionist was still dubious. I then explained that you can purchase the exact machine from an Australian distributor and that they come over in the same shipment. I just skipped the middleman and had the company ship it directly to me. She then said "Well, you can bring it to us and I can get one of the techs to have a look, but they might not even want to open it up. There's still a $40 fee to be told that they won't even look". 
Wow. Ok. That was option one, albeit fairly unpromising.

I then called Dynapumps who're an Australian company that now sell a very similar domestic freezedryer, in the hopes that they might have a recommendation for a repair place that I could send it to internally rather than sending the machine back to the US. I spoke to a very lovely sales guy who said that he'd try to find out who they would send machines to for repair if needed but that they didn't have someone internal at this stage. So far I haven't heard back.

Rang a second local mob who advised they also would be very unlikely to be able to help, however they did recommend a local commercial company who repair fridges and freezers for stores like IGA and Colesworth. I contacted them, and they essentially said they weren't sure if they could help but that they'd send a tech out to have a look to see if they could even do anything. Massive step forward, to even get someone on the property was a bit of a win.
So this morning one of their techs came in to have a look. After an hour or futzing about he said that he couldn't even get into the machine to have a proper look! Turned out you really just needed two people to get into it if you don't already know exactly how to get the side off *chuckle*. I went out and between the two of us we got the side casing of the machine off which allowed him to have a look at what was going on. I left him to it, and after about twenty minutes or so he came to get me... WITH THE MACHINE RUNNING! What had changed? He removed the earthing portion of the circuit by unplugging the earth cable. Obviously not safe to leave it like that but it confirmed the previous sparky's guess that there was a problem with the earth.

It seems that (and we're not certain at this point but the diagnostics are promising) there is a problem with the earthing pin on the power point at the back of the machine. He's taken the connector away with him to get a replacement one, and said that he'll be back this afternoon to replace it and we're crossing fingers, toes and nose that its the only problem.

This little bugger is the likely culprit:


Other potential culprits are;
The boards. There are two, but unlikely that these are the issues as it runs when the earthing cable is not attached.
The compressor. Also unlikely, same reason as above.
The fan. As above, so below.

So at this stage I'm extremely hopeful that it's just the plug point which can be swapped out very easily. I suppose the next problem could be the earthing cable itself but I'm no sparky so I'm not sure if that's possible. If that's the case hopefully it's another easy replacement.

I sent old mate off with a bag of FD'd Minties as a thank you for even coming out. I'm hopeful that should anything go bang in the future, he'll be willing to come and have a look at it again for me! I'm also hopeful that (once fixed) nothing DOES go bang again haha. At this stage we have a possible way forward. Before now there wasn't even a hope that we could do anything to fix it alone as it was more than just replacing a power cable or an external part on a pump. 
Definitely something to be aware of if you're looking at getting one of these machines. The sparky that we had said that any good sparky should have been able to diagnose the problem and come up with some solutions... It was just that none of them were even willing to try because of the machine's somewhat 'exotic' provenance and function.

That is definitely the risk that we considered when we purchased it, no doubt about that.

The cost difference was significant and having someone come to do repairs locally was difficult to achieve, but it's something I'd have done either way because we still would have had to pay our own money to ship it over east for someone to do the same level of repair work. Despite assumptions to the contrary, warranty covers machines only for the local distributor. Not the cost of sending the machine to the source for repairs or replacement. The local mob have a limited warranty despite their insistence otherwise. They either don't understand how their own warranty works (I read through it before I bought from anyone) or they intentionally disguise the fact that shipping costs aren't covered to get a machine to them. So we'd still have to pay to get it over east and back. If the machine had to be returned to the US then the cost of that would be covered by the company, but the cost of shipping it back to the US is basically the same as the cost to ship it over east for us. So we really wouldn't have saved any money in the event of it requiring repairs, and that's something that I factored when buying it direct.

The first locals that we contacted are appliance technicians specifically, so they're legally covered by their insurance to work on appliances. That's why it was frustrating that they wouldn't even look. The guy that did the work for me this morning said that any standard appliance tech could do the work because the only thing that was a little 'odd' (using his term) is the boards that run the vacuum pump and computer. Otherwise, he said everything is easily recognisable as standard fridge/freezer parts. And he said that the boards being slightly different makes no changes to what a tech would do, they'd simply replace it with a new one. He was extremely baffled that they said no without even seeing the machine

But on that note he returned just now and has done a bit more testing and found that unfortunately it's NOT the plug point that has problems as we'd hoped. The compressor is bonked. Fortunately he said that if I get in touch with the tech team from Harvest Right and they say that a locally sourced compressor can be used so long as it matches the capacity then he knows exactly where to get a replacement compressor from. He said that they also carry the gas required onboard as standard so he should be able to get it running again as soon as we have a replacement.

The compressor is a Chinese one which I find mildly hilarious because the yanks on the FB page go off constantly about other machines having Chinese parts, but HR are made in America, dammit! Well, sure. But the parts they use when they build them for EU or AU use are Chinese so they're not as yankee doodle as ya'll think bwahahaha.

I've submitted a ticket with HR, if I haven't heard back from them in a couple of days I'll give them a call. I suspect they'll send a replacement compressor but I'll have to pay for the shipping. If that's the case I'll happily take that hit, our sparky friend said he can definitely install it for us.

So we're still a few weeks at least off a resolution but the best outcome possible has occurred. I've found a local sparky who, despite working for a commercial company, is happy to continue to work on it and get it up and running again. I'm registered as a client with them even though I don't own a business and it's all above board so into the future I won't have to spend days searching for someone that will even take the side off the machine haha. He also said that if the costs start to mount, to look into our insurance to see if it'll cover some of the costs because we might be able to put a claim in for it. I'll keep that one in the back pocket if it all starts getting expensive.

I also think a lot of modern sparkies haven't the reasoning ability to work out whats wrong with what are becoming quite complex appliances nowadays, so they just are not interested.

I did commercial appliance repairs for a large company for several years part time, and even the humble food processor was becoming computerized and more complicated. What should be a simple machine, needed a uni degree to service !

Besides, most consumer grade items are now throw away, as I discovered when our microwave died recently. I cant even buy a new magnetron for it as Aldies had it specially made. Sure, I could shoe horn one to fit from another brand, but u really need the exact fit otherwise there is a lot of RF floating around that can cause trouble. The real killer is a new microwave was less than $150, and a magnetron is about $90 new, so its not worth it. On the plus side, its given me another emp proof storage area.




Great madness sweeps the land. There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness and confidence in the rightness of one's opinions. Extremes only become more extreme even as the folly of previous extremes wearies rationality.