Harvest Right Freeze Drier Hints and Tips

okay one of the first tips i want to share with you is the drain valve now this to me this thing just kind of flops around all over the place and i really think this is kind of sloppy engineering on the side of harvest right and i wish they'd do something about it so what we're gonna and my concern about that is that this top the upper hose up here has a metal spiral in it and so behind the plastic is a piece of metal and as this rubs back and forth i'm afraid that this surface is going to be chafed to where it's going to start leaking and so if you do have a error message that comes up on your back on your freeze dryer a lot you might want to check this area in here just to make sure you don't have a hole and you'd probably hear the the vacuum hissing if you did so what we're going to do we're going to take a zip tie and we're going to go into the top hole and bring that back down to a bottom hole just like a big u-turn and we're going to grab this right like that put it through there and then we're going to put we're going to put this all the way up inside to where this brass shoulder is and then we're going to tighten up this wire tie make it as tight as you can and then we're just going to trim the end and now this thing won't flop all around and you can go ahead and turn it off and on to your heart's desire now my next tip deals with the drain back here now i do not run my drain into the container i have a gallon container here i've never seen any more volume come out of my freeze dryer than a gallon i have in the back of my freeze dryer and i have my hose terminated just above the drain i've seen lots of stories about people opening up their freeze dryer and releasing the vacuum and their hose is down into the water and they suck water up into their chamber and it spoils their food i've seen people drill holes in the tubes put vacuum breakers and all sorts of gadgets to keep that from happening well this is the simplest solution of all cut off your holes let it dribble or let it drain from above into your container and you'll never have water enter your vacuum chamber guaranteed my next hint or tip deals with the holes that goes between the vacuum pump and the freeze dryer i have mine suspended with a wire so that the high point is right in the center of the hose the reason i do that is because it's going to make it harder for any particulates to be able to travel up through the holes and then back down into my vacuum pump ever since i've done this i get less food particulates in my oil and it's a pretty simple solution just with a little piece of wire or with a coat hanger if you want i'd like to give you a tip on what i do when i reach the final dry stage on my freeze dryer right now i have a load of asparagus inside and one of the things i've learned about asparagus is it doesn't dry real equally and so what i like to do is what i call pausing the freeze dryer and that's where i'm going to open it up and kind of move the food around on the tray make sure everything is nice and dry plus it also gives me an opportunity to see if i need to add more time now i have four minutes left on the final drive but it kind of gives me an idea how things are going when i get down to maybe an hour or 30 minutes i will do the same thing so the way i pause the freeze drive mode is first i go over here to the valve down here and everyone knows what this thing is so i'll go ahead and open this up and you can hear the vacuum venting and i don't have to worry about i don't have to worry about sucking up any water because my tube does not go into my picture so after i give this a few minutes to die down as you can see i'll come over here to the back of my pump and i'll turn my pump off and almost immediately the vacuum will end i'll go ahead and open up the latch open this up take out my pad [Music] and i'm going to check my asparagus now i used to cut my asparagus i used to leave my asparagus whole but i found out that by the time it got freeze dried i would put it into the bag and seal it those really nice pieces of asparagus would break up anyway so i have learned it's easier just to go ahead and cut my asparagus into smaller pieces so i can feel see here's a piece here's a cold piece right here i'll go ahead and put my hand around on here and i can feel the cold pieces there's a cold piece right here and there's some cold pieces right here so i'll just kind of come in here move things around and i'm going to do that on each tray now another thing you can do which is also helpful i'm going to do it on this one but first i have a trivia question which one of these trays is the warmest is this the warmest most people say this is and i also agree talking to the people at harvest right they actually say that these two trays are the warmest trays because they're farther away from the ice they do agree that this tray down here on the bottom is the coldest tray because this tray is closest to the ice and if you actually take a look down at the insulation material they have down here they actually have two layers of material down here where up here you only have one layer so and also you have to remember that heat rises so all the heat from all these trays which eventually will migrate up to this tray so in addition to stirring what you can actually do you can take out this tray which we think is the coldest tray and swap it with a warmer tray then we can take these two trays and swap them also we put our pad back in [Music] go ahead and lock it up go back to the pump turn the pump back on come over here and close the valve that is what i call pausing the freeze dryer and i'll do that throughout the dry cycle just to keep an eye on everything i'm fortunate this time because when you dry the same type of food in all of your trays it dries even equally if i was drying say asparagus and milk the asparagus would get done way way long before the milk would ever finish up so i've always found it helpful to dry the same types of food to have the same amount of moisture thanks for watching like me if you can hey this is phil from phil's place just a quick little tip on how i change the oil for my freeze dryer i do have the compressor that does require oil and i just finished a batch just minutes ago so this compressor excuse me this vacuum pump is still nice and warm and that's when you want to do an oil change you do not want to wait for it to go cold because the warmer the oil is the higher viscosity is going to be and it's going to flow a lot better out of your pump out of your vacuum pump in addition when i change the oil i have a little block of wood that i'll use in the back to raise it up so as oil flows out it's going to flow out at a higher rate and take all those little particulates of food that may be trapped in the reservoir along with any water is going to be inside so we take up this is a good old standard uh filter that is supplied by harvest right so we're going to open that up and we're just going to let that drain for the next couple of minutes now while my oil is draining the next thing i will do is i will defrost my freeze dryer now i do not go through the defrost mode on my freeze dryer and i'll tell you why so inside here we have a number of heating pads there's a heating pad down here there's one up above here there's one up above here here and here when you use the defrost mode on the freeze dryer these pads heat up it heats up the truck the shelf and also heats up the entire chamber and that's a little bit counterproductive when i want to do my next cycle i got things in the freezer waiting to be freeze-dried and what i do not want i do not want to heat up the chamber for my next cycle so what i'm going to do i'm going to remove the gasket i'm just going to place that right up on top and i have this little fan that you can see that's nailed on a board and what i do with this it slides right up in there and and i'll just turn it on and this will take the the warmer air from my garage and we'll cycle it inside the chamber and everyone have seen how the chamber has all this ice that's all around it the defrost mode on the harvest right freeze dryer will take two hours in the summertime this will take about 20 minutes in the winter time this will take about 40 minutes and using an electric fan takes a lot less power than the heating elements inside the chamber so we're going to set my timer for about 40 minutes we'll come back and i'll show you the next step okay it's been about 40 minutes now before i pull this ice out what i do is i have this little tote down in the bottom to catch all the liquid so this is dripping from the front of the chamber and in the back of the chamber so we're going to take this out turn that off now one thing you don't want to do you just don't want to grab this and yank it out there's a cable in the back and i have seen from time to time the cable will actually freeze itself into the ice and so you don't want to damage anything so just take this it's got to give this a little bit of a rock if you can rock it this way you're going to take this whole thing out with all the ice and it will drop right to the bottom and i'm just gonna put that right on top and all this come right out now the nice thing about this you now have an internal temperature in here that's almost near freezing we got 37 37 degrees or so 37 36 degrees so once this is wiped out you can put the rack back inside and replace the sill and cover and you're ready to start another cycle and instead of be instead of your chamber being 100 degrees because of the heating elements it's near freezing and because i start all my loads that i do are pre-frozen i save a lot of time by having a cold chamber hey all you freeze dryer people out there this is phil again from phil's place and today i want to talk about vacuum pump oil now everyone who gets the vacuum to get the freeze dryer from harvest right they get along with their purchase some vacuum pump oil well it wasn't too long that i used up my vacuum pump oil and needed to get a replacement so i reached out to harvest right to buy contacts there and they referred two very well known vacuum pump oil one is black gold and the other one is made by dairyland now i'd like to kind of discuss a little bit the the black gold the first thing i noticed about black gold it is extremely clear and it has a tendency to flow better which means the viscosity of black gold is a little bit thinner than the viscosity of dairyland now dairyland is blue in color and for the likes of me i don't understand why it is blue and that kind of poses a couple of issues that i'd like to discuss just to give a some quick background i pulled the sd sds sheets on these two products and reviewed those now for those who don't know what an sds sheet is it stands for safety data sheet a few years back they used to be called msds which was material safety data sheet but due to the united nations and all this other stuff and the global harmonized system that was all changed now section 11 of the sds sheet for black gold has no significant effects on exposure now dairyland the only listing they have under the toxicology information is there could be temporary eye irritation black gold is made by a company called pinnacle oil holdings llc dairyland is manufactured by sturge packaging corporation and the oil from harvestright on their sds sheet does not give any manufacturer name but it is distributed by bosch and on the ss on the sds sheet with harvest right the only thing they say is avoid contact with skin and eyes now on the black gold they do show the viscosity which is getting really technical here is at 104 degrees it will pour at point 21 cubic meters per second there's no data on viscosity from dairy land or harvest right but from my own observations the black gold oil is a little bit thinner and that could be important for one reason when you're draining the oil out of your vacuum pump the better it flows the lower the viscosity the better the oil is going to be able to sweep out particulates and water out of your vacuum pump the thicker the oil the slower that is going to happen and that's what one of my recommendations is when you do drain your oil out of your vacuum pump you want to do it when it is hot not when it's cold hot oil flows better than cold oil just like any other thick substance like honey for example now both of these are good oils i've used both of those i'm going to show you one of my uh irritations i could say with the dairyland product okay so i have a couple samples of dairyland oil and the black gold oil both of these have been through about 10 cycles in my freeze dryer now what i don't like about dairyland is the color because of the color as i'm working with i can see if you can see down in there that's all the remnants and the crud that's left over and as i do it it's kind of hard for me to see where the water might be and it's just it's hard to tell what's inside the oil because it's not clear now on the other hand with the black gold because it is clear i can see down in there a lot better and i can see when the crud is coming up and the water and i can stop leaving the crud and the water in the container both of these products are just fine with freeze drying but the only thing i don't like about the dairyland is is the dye that they put in it or whatever additive is in it because with me it's easier to see the particulates and the water in a clear oil than in a dark oil and that's my only problem i have with dairyland [Music] okay one of the things you can do when you're freeze drying and you're in the final stage or in final dry is when what i like to do depending on how full my trays are going to be is i like to kind of stir my trays and rearrange the food in the last process during the final dry stage and basically what i kind of call this is pausing the freeze dryer and i'm going to show you how you can pause the freeze dryer [Music] okay the first thing i do if i want to stop the freeze drying process is i take my valve i go ahead and open that to release the vacuum and i'll let that run for maybe 10 15 seconds and you can kind of hear the vacuum decrease as the majority of the vacuum is voided from the vacuum chamber the next part is reaching back behind your vacuum pump and turning the pump off go ahead and unleash the door and just give it a second and you'll be able to open it up and have access to your trays now for example on this bottom tray i have a lot of cheese cheese dries very well but usually i'll go in here and just kind of move things around so that everything has a chance gets to get nice and warm so it will help evaporate or sublimate the moisture this right here is totally hard this was vanilla yogurt so i really can't move that anywhere the one i'm concerned about is this tray this tray is rather full and so i'm actually going to take this tray out take it into the kitchen i'm going to and i'm going to rearrange all the vegetables on this tray because it's really overloaded okay so i took this tray rearranged a lot of the food on it and i'm gonna put that back in uh the tray up on top of here are my steaks and i'm just to take these and just turn them upside down [Music] and this is just a sample of asparagus and put those back in now one of the things i can do i have three hours left in the drying cycle i'm going to come back down out here in about two and a half hours and i'm going to check this once again i can pretty much bet that this this is a mozzarella cheese this is our this feels like it's already done and so what i actually can actually do is i can take the mozzarella cheese out and then transfer some of the vegetables from this tray down into this tray and kind of spread them out a little bit so they're not all you know so they're not so compact up in that tray and then i can go ahead and give give my my system about maybe two additional hours and finish drying my vegetables that way and you just do the same thing in reverse to get this started again i can just reach back here shut my valve and then just reach back and turn on the pump and everything will be just fine [Music] okay we're back to the freeze dryer time's about up so i'm going to check my food again this is a mozzarella cheese and this feels like it is absolutely dry that is done the steaks i can feel a couple of cold spots right in there some cold spots in there when you're checking your food if you feel cold spots don't try to package the meat they'll just spoil everything it's better to have them over dry than under dry you feel any cold spots that's not done okay the yogurt that is done i can take that out now the vegetables are still cold so what i'm going to do i'm going to empty the two other trays and return them and put and spread the food from this tray into the other trays okay so it turns out my yogurt wasn't dry yet so i chopped it up a little bit to help it dry a little bit better but my cheese was dry so i'm going to take some of the vegetables from this drawer from this shelf [Music] and put them down below until i overloaded these trays a little bit [Music] [Music] okay [Music] so you close the valve and turn on the pump again and add a little bit of extra time and come back later on phil here again from phil's place today we're going to do a process improvement called a kaizen what we're going to do we're going to determine if it makes a difference on how food is laid out on your freeze-dried tray so in both trays we have pork loin and each tray has exactly 712 grams of pork loin in this tray it's laid flat like you'd normally do but in this tray we have the pork loin that's layered on top of the one underneath it so we're going to see which one will dry faster both have the same weight and what we're going to do we're going to put these drawers these trays in the number two and three drawer or shelves in my freeze dryer and i have a medium freeze dryer that has four shelves and for those who've done freeze drying in the past you probably know that the top drawer is a little bit warmer and the bottom drawer is a little bit colder so to make this a fair test we're going to put these in drawers number two and three and then we're going to measure the weight about every hour so let's begin so this was pretty much a no-brainer this tray where the food was laying flat freeze-dried after 19 and a half hours this tray where everything was stacked up on top of each other finished up around 29 hours we started out with 712 grams of meat in both trays this tray ended up at 180 grams this tray ended up at 185 grams so they are totally dry this is pork loin and this is ready to bag the only benefit although this tray finished earlier this tray you could probably put double the amount and added only 10 more hours so it's not really a worthless cause if i had a choice i probably would dry my meat this way i usually do just so i can get more meat done quicker thanks for watching hi this is phil again from phil's place i'd like to show you a really easy way that i use to seal the mylar bags so we have two bags right here ready to be sealed i got my temperature all the way up okay here's my oxygen absorbers so i'm just going to open this little envelope take two absorbers out put them in the bags you put this back on setting number three and i'm going to seal this back up for later use okay so what i do i put my sealer right on the edge of the counter then i take my bag and i fold it all the way over to get all the air out and i just bring up the end just a little bit like that put on the very edge of the sealer take it back up to 10. and you can hear the electric elements hum when the when it becomes hot and i usually will hold that there just a little bit longer so it can cool down these bags are a thermal plastic they get hot enough to melt to bind together and before i release the upper arm i want that to cool off so that the seal is complete so here i sealed the top and then going to come down right above the tear tabs and put in my second seal so the heating element is now off i'm just going to hold it there for about two seconds to cool down just like that and i always give a little bit of inspection take a look across the sill to make sure i don't have any creases or anything there that could allow the oxygen again fold this all the way over we get all the air out let's bring it just a hair stick it in this ceiling power is off going to hold it there just for a couple of seconds let it cool down do it again make two cells all together just like that and then once you're done you can actually stick the material back down and have a nice nice even storage bag my next tip is to level your freeze dryer not the freeze dryer itself but to level the actual trays this is important if you're going to be doing liquids such as freeze dried milk in this case i'm using a line level leveling it from left to right is relatively simple because you just have to move the tray assembly and you can level that from left to right now however you also need to level it front to rear the easiest way that i found to do that is to level the legs down here by using basically door shims door shims are the same things that are used to level a door when it's being installed they're thin on one end and they're thick on the back end and you can lift up your freeze dryer it may take two people to do it but then you can level the legs here and the legs over on this other side from front to rear so if i go back to my level down in here if i go ahead and put it in this direction you can see that my level is just a little bit off so i need to go down to the bottom and actually level this a little bit up so i can get my bubble exactly straight okay so you can see here that i've used the shims under the legs of my freeze dryer to the top of the table to label to level my freeze dryer from front to back now that that is level i can put the maximum amount of milk or liquids into my trays without having them spill over the next step i have is when you're freeze drying you want to balance your trays you don't want to have a lot of food in this tray and very little food in that tray and not only do you want to balance your trays but as much as possible you want to freeze dry the same types of food i mean for example you wouldn't want to do a tray of milk and a tray of sweet potatoes because the milk is going to take much longer to do than the sweet potatoes so you want to kind of average out the content of how much moisture your food have and try to keep the same types of food like maybe sweet potatoes carrots and peas for example so in this case i have asparagus now this tray has 115 grams 231 grams 268 grams and 552 grams so the average is going to be 1192 grams now i have a little scale i use got this from harbor freight for under 20 bucks so this tray this tray is 152 so i have to add it a few pieces to get it up to 11.92 that's 11.95 so this one's done now it's not going to be exactly the same amount but we're going to get as close as we possibly can this is 12 32 so i have to subtract some from this one 11.95 close enough this tray has 10 54. so i'm gonna add some extra this one now this may seem a little bit on the anal side but to me it works a lot better this way okay that's 11.83 11.93 perfect and my last tray here is 1182 so that's pretty darn close so i have four trays with the same amount of food in each tray that way all the trays should finish around the same time so i won't have one tray that's done in another tray that still has ice crystals in the food hey everybody this is phil from phil's place just with a real quick freeze drying tip the best way and the most effective way and the cheapest way of freeze drying is the pre-freeze your food before put it into your fridge dryer and what i do since i don't have an extra set of trays which costs about 80 85 for a set of four i have a standard cookie sheet here and you can either use a ruler or what i did i just got a seven inch wide piece of cardboard and you can go ahead and pre lay out so to speak a row of food in this case i'm doing some rump roast right here and you can go ahead and lay this out and throw this into the freezer and go ahead and freeze this and then transfer it to a regular standard tray so we're going to put this in the freezer for probably about an hour or so and freeze it and they're going to transfer into a tray and then throw it in the freeze dryer okay so we got the meat out of the freezer let me go work underneath it and just pick it up place it right inside now we have two trays ready to go here's my next tip how many people have a problem with their freezer space now i'm not lucky enough to have a spare shelf and so what i've had to do is put a couple of boxes on my top shelf to put my meats in and then i have to stack the shelves up on the top which as you can see it's kind of crowded but it comes this idea so what i did i welded my self up a shelf now this is basically made out of half inch 1 16 inch flat bar this is going to be here on these ends by the current supports in the freezer once i clean everything up it's going to kind of sit right on the top of the current shelves and that will give me two shelves slide my trays into now i suppose you can make something like this out of wood i'm just lucky enough to have a shop with a welder and some other tools the total cost of this was under 10 knife went ahead and put a power coated it i know not everyone has equipment to do this but you could probably get someone to weld it up for you or you could probably make something like this out of bolts and nuts or maybe even wood okay so that's what my shelf looks like once it's installed let me tell you the pain to get it in there because the door doesn't open all the way so basically i have a shelf up here at the top for one two and i can put three down here and basically it just kind of straddles the current shelf you can see where i just drilled the holes through the the sides and then i cut right through the holes so it made like a little saddle work everything back inside so i'll go ahead and put my boxes back in and we'll see how it fits okay so now you can see how this kind of all works together uh i have my guacamole guacamole right here getting ready to put into the freezer and i have my tray of peace so i actually have enough room for one more tray but that's just going to be the oddball unless you happen to have a five tray dehydrator but mine is a four tray dehydrator and another tip i have is don't cover your food when you put it in the fur no i have a frost-free freezer and i'm sure everyone has have heard of freezer burn freezer burn is nothing more than freeze drying so if you leave your food uncovered as the air rushes across the food it will actually help take some of the moisture out of the food prior to freeze drying so i leave all my food uncovered uh the longest my food stays in there is probably only maybe two or four you know four to five hours until it's you know freezes and everything i put into my freeze dryer is pre-frozen so i hope this might give you some ideas let me do with your freezer

Channel: Phil at 4800 feet

Views: 6,409

Rating: 4.973856 out of 5

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Id: cEgkJ6euao0

Length: 42min 39sec (2559 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021