Food Storage: Is It Worth It to Purchase a Freeze Dyer?

we've had our harvest right freeze dryer for about a month now is it really worth the cost hi i'm jonathan and kyleene jones and we are the provident preppers about a month ago our harvest right freeze dryer arrived and we've totally been in the honeymoon phase with this and been freeze drying everything that we can and we've got some incredible videos coming up for you but in this video what we want to do is just kind of review our first impression is it worth it to buy a harvest right freeze dryer does it make a significant difference in your ability to store food a couple of the concerns that we had going into this uh from people that we had talked to was the first the power cost and also the oil changes let me address both of those as it turns out the power cost really isn't that bad depending on what we're doing and how long it takes it costs between one and two dollars per batch so when you think about that and spread that over four trays and the product that you get it's really not very bad at all our electricity rate is about 10 cents a kilowatt hour so you can gauge that according to your electrical cost the other one was the oil changes and i'd heard just war stories about how hard it was to do the oil changes for me it's really fairly easy it's fairly fast when it's time to change the oil and right now we have the regular pump the premier pump will soon be coming but with the regular pump you're supposed to change that every four or five batches so after four batches all i do is put the container below open the valve let it all drain out close the valve and put new oil in it takes maybe five to ten minutes so to me this is really not a big deal i haven't found that to be a problem at all and my piece of it is the cost so we don't have much freeze-dried food stored well we didn't used to because it's just so expensive um i actually am a fan of valley food storage so i'm not saying anything bad about them we are affiliates for them there are very few companies that we actually promote but valley food storage is one of them because of the quality of the food and they don't put a lot of additives in it so this isn't a big spiel for valley food storage but i'm going to compare um what we've done so these are white chicken dices these cost roughly about 20 dollars from valley food storage and it has 10 servings in it now when we did rotisserie chicken we bought the rotisserie chicken from costco and three rotisserie chickens we took all the meat off we did not freeze dry the skin and we chopped it up and i actually rinsed the second time that we did it because the more fat that you have the shorter your shelf life and we are hoping for a really nice long shelf life but those chickens cost five dollars each so for fifteen dollars we were able to get four similar sized bags to this one that's 20. okay not really for 15 because i didn't add in the power cost which was probably a couple of bucks yeah probably two dollars but um that's a significant cost savings for me and then not only that i know where i'm getting my food from some of the other things that we've done is in order to share and to make sure that our neighbors are prepared um one of our neighbors raises a cow every season right and he has hamburger and so what he did was he gave us a bunch of his hamburger to freeze dry we cooked it up with onions and we freeze dried it and then we gave them part of it and we kept part for freeze drying it and for bagging it for them so it's a win-win situation we have this incredible grass-fed beef that we wouldn't be able to really afford if we went out to buy it and they have some of it shelf stable in their food storage now so it's it's really a good arrangement that we have um augason farms which is another food storage company that we are affiliates with because we do like their product a number 10 can which is 15 servings of white chicken dices is 74 or 75 so you can see how much money you could save by freeze drying it's work though i mean it's really work um my plan is to freeze dry a whole bunch of chicken wait till it goes on sale really inexpensively and then marinate it and cook it up so that it's just perfect the way that our family likes it in a bunch of different ways similarly strawberries and pineapples are 12.95 a bag when we did these strawberries we bought them for six dollars for eight pounds of strawberries because every once in a while they go on sale at the local market and we can get a flat of them and so our cost of these strawberries was significantly below what we could buy now we did freeze dry a bunch of bananas but unfortunately ben really likes the bananas and like this morning he opened one of these bags and bananas and it's gone and yet what a great snack right instead of snacking on junk food snacking on whole foods that are really healthy for us one of the other concerns that we have heard a lot is that i'm not a techno person and the freeze dryer might just be beyond what i can handle right um i'm glad that john does the oil changes and i'm very blessed to have a wonderful handyman that takes care of all of that um for the most part it's not really technical we did have a problem this last week and it kept giving us an error message saying that the vacuum pump had failed or the vacuum wasn't able to draw a complete vacuum yeah like it gave a number eight number nine number ten kind of error message and it was really discouraging and at that time we were freeze-drying well i had it happened in a few batches but the time when we couldn't get it to work anymore um it was on some dog treats that we were making and we'll put out a video on that but it's possible it could have had something to do with the product i don't know but we're back up and running and harvest right was really good to work with us i felt like they really cared um that we had something that was working well so i i would agree with that i think they do a really good job with their customer service that is important to them yeah and they have it set up so they don't have to have anybody come out and look at it um there's a little you can take a jump drive and there's a little slot in the side and you you just stick it in there and it will record all of the data that they need to evaluate what exactly is going on with your freeze dryer now some of the things that i think are important to note is that the original pump is noisy it's kind of obnoxious i understand that the premier pump that should be arriving for us soon that there's not an issue with that um and we'll see right we'll evaluate it but look at all the food that we've been able to freeze dry within the last month and usually we don't freeze dry on sundays that's kind of our thing sunday's our day where where we have a different devotion and so we don't work or anything like that on sunday but um also we've got a lot of this that is in our friends and neighbors hands now right building their food storage and helping to make all of us a little bit more self-reliant my overall impression is very favorable i really like the machine as we mentioned there is a fairly high up front cost but then if you're using it effectively i think that gets paid off fairly quickly i would probably disagree a little bit on the noisiness of the pump he's a brave we have the regular pump and i don't find it to be all that noisy it's uh the machine makes a little bit of noise and the pump makes a little bit of noise but i don't find it offensive at all um like i said we will be getting the premier pump and they say that's even quieter so it might be something that you could even do in your house and and not have a problem with it and that's the other thing a standard pump you change the oil every five times but the premier you only have to do it every 25 so it does require less maintenance and they do have an oilless pump if you want to go that route but it is substantially more expensive i think the premier pump is going to be a great one for us now we think the freeze dryer is a really cool thing but i want to say something about this because we have been preparing for a long time and we only have one child still living here at home and we have not been able to afford a freeze dryer up to this point we have survived just fine without it you do not need to have one in order to be able to store food and be able to take good care of your family i'm incredibly grateful for especially two things um the fact that i can store cheese that i have shelf stable cheese that reconstitutes really well that's a really big deal to me and then the other thing that's a big deal this is some of that hamburger that we had freeze-dried for our friend i this is amazing so it's all cooked up right and yet all i have to do is add water to reconstitute this and it's a snap to make dinner and the texture is good and the flavor is good that's not something that i could get with the canned meats that we've had so far so i am incredibly grateful for it but you do not have to have it in order to build your food supply yeah right we strongly encourage you not to go into debt ever we abhor debt and we think debt is a bad way to go we can't tell you what to do but but we would encourage you not to go into debt to get something save up and then get it when it's right and if you do want to purchase it we will leave a link in the description of this video to take you to harvest right because we are an affiliate for them um and that would be great but seriously um it's a fantastic product but it is not necessary now one of the reasons why we decided to create this video is because we've got all this food from this past month and it's time to package it for long-term storage now minor bags one of the huge problems with them is that a mouse can chew through them very quickly and you would be amazed you might not think you have mice and then suddenly you'll find that some of your food storage is destroyed so it's really important to store it in some type of a bucket or a tote i found that the totes work better because of the size because once these are the oxygen absorber has sucked in all the sides they're they don't like squish really well so it's kind of a little bit of tetris to get them fitted the way that they need to be fitted um and so the tote just allows you a little bit more space to do that um i like the really sturdy totes that costco has just because they're very inexpensive and yet they seal up really well um the thing with the jars that i'm concerned about is an earthquake right they're beautiful in the jars they're susceptible to light so light will degrade the the food inside aren't those peppers beautiful oh my goodness like those were harvested from our indoor garden and they taste amazing okay i'm sidetracked so what we're gonna do is i'm going to put the jars cushioned at the bottom of the tote and then i'll fill the rest of it with mylar bags that should protect both from damage from earthquake or damage from rodents it's really important to make sure that you protect your food you've worked hard to get it right it's expensive it's valuable it's worth protecting um one of the cool things is even when this is full it will be light enough that i can carry it because all of the moisture has been removed and so these bags are really light bottles you know they're light but um you know they have the weight of the bottle so that's what we're gonna do and on the way while we're doing it we are going to inventory what we put in here and label what's inside and the dates on the outside of this bucket and put it into our inventory system so we know what we have and if i'm looking for a package of freeze-dried rotisserie chicken i know exactly where i can find it one of the other things that we learned this month was about the mylar bags so harvest right has these they're really nice thick mylar bags they're they really are really nice but do you see how they they just don't stand up well they they fall over they're harder to package um but we found these incredibly thick mylar bags that have um both the the zip closed so you can fill them as full as you can put an oxygen absorber in and then zip it and then turn it on at side to seal and it really seems like it's easier to to fill it more to capacity i love the gusseted bottoms on it so that they stand up straight once i open these packages then i do have the ability to zip the contents closed again and freeze-dried food if you let it sit out in it will absorb the moisture from the air very quickly so in order to protect your foods this is a really cool thing i'll leave a link in the description of this video these by far are now my favorite um mylar bags so now we have a new tub of freeze-dried meats cheeses fruits and vegetables to add to our long-term food storage harvest right says that they will store up to 25 years when stored correctly in a cool dry location and they're protected right from light and and um rodents however um some of the like the meat that has fat on it and the cheese i'm not sure if i would push it to the 25 years i think would be better off to rotate it between five and ten years so we have good high quality and we don't have to worry about it turning rancid and then we've got to start on the next tote and we'll see how much we can fill up this month that's right and now for the question of the day if you have a harvest right freeze dryer give us your comments and your impressions comment below and be incredibly honest right because the more transparent that we can be as we talk about the pros and cons of a freeze dryer the more valuable our feedback will be to those that are looking into buying a freeze dryer because it might not be for everybody depending on their financial situation or their stage in life for us i'm thrilled and it's a wonderful asset for us to build our food storage the important thing is that you get the job done whether it's with a freeze dryer or not make sure that you're putting away provisions for your future and thanks for being part of the solution [Music]

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 52,992

Rating: 4.9421129 out of 5

Keywords: Harvest Right Freeze Dryer, Freeze Drying, Food Storage, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI, Emergency Preparedness, Freeze Dried Food, Survival Food Supply

Id: AEcG6SpAnqg

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021