Watch this BEFORE you Buy a Freeze Dryer! HARVESTRIGHT Freeze Dryer Review After 3 years

hey everybody it's brian with retired at 40. welcome to the freeze drying room well the time is here i've had the freeze dryer for over three years now and now i've actually got two freeze dryers i've got the new version and the older one that's uh it's actually over three years now so about two years ago i did a one year of ownership video on this freeze dryer and i touched on a lot of the positives i thought and the negatives of what the freeze dryer were at that time but now having the new freeze dryer i can also kind of compare these two side by side so today's video is going to be completely transparent i'm going to walk you through all the issues i've had with the old one um some of the things that they've resolved since the since the old one was made into the new version i'm going to go through all of the positives and negatives that i've experienced we're also going to do a comparison and review of the standard vacuum pump versus the premier vacuum pump so if you're looking for an honest and transparent review of the harvest right freeze dryer from a guy that's been freeze drying for more than three years now you've come to the right place so buckle up because we've got a lot to cover today coming up so let's talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to the harvest right and that is the enormous price tag and what is always going to be the biggest hurdle and the number one concern for most people so i actually got my freeze dryer as a birthday present from my wife about three years ago back then the price was i believe 23.95 24.95 something like that and not a whole lot has changed in three years the price has gone up a bit but rightly so they've made lots of improvements to the new one and there's been a large spike in demand in the last year and people are really starting to see the value of freeze drying and freeze-dried food so to kind of play devil's advocate on that i have found if you go in with a plan of how you're going to basically recoup your money this will recoup your money relatively quick i have found within nine months to a year but if you're going into this freeze drying 24 7 365 it can be a lot quicker than that at the time this video is being made the current cost is 26.95 for a comparable model this was 26.95 this is the medium size with four trays and depending on which size freeze dryer you end up going with you can see there's a large difference in tray size and there's also the amount of trays you get with each size so a small you're going to get three of these smaller trays a medium you're going to get four of the medium-sized trays and this large size which is quite a bit larger you're getting five of the large trays so again depending on what your plan is the medium size can do 7 to 10 pounds of food per batch so obviously you can see how quickly that would add up if it's running 24 7. you can pretty much do a batch every 24 to 30 ish hours and the large being even more than that you can do 12 to 16 pounds of food every batch in the large so next let's get into a big big big positive for me it might not be as big a positive for other people so i've been freeze drying for a little over three years now i've done hundreds and hundreds of cycles and the food quality compared to the store-bought stuff is it's just not comparable and i've got other videos if you want to check them out it shows the difference in the food quality it shows the cost difference so let's take a look at a real example so i have stuff that was done really when i started freeze drying i mean this pork right here is september of 2017 so that was really only a month after i started and the mylar obviously you're not going to be able to see what's in there but i do plenty of stuff in ball jars i have everything from apples to bloody mary mix spaghetti sauce to three-year-old pork and being able to choose what i freeze dry especially if it's something that i've made like this as opposed to something that's bought in the store to me there's no comparison the choice of store-bought freeze-dried foods sucks you can also utilize all of your leftovers so you pretty much have zero waste if you want to freeze dry it food that's been freeze-dried also retains 97 of its nutrients you can't do that with dehydrated food and in almost every circumstance the taste is there as well being able to control the quality of the food the taste of the food and the nutritional value of the food is huge and there's no other products that you can do that with in the home setting there are of course a few things that don't freeze dry peanut butter doesn't freeze dry chocolate doesn't freeze dry very high fat oily foods and also very sugary foods like honey my quick rebuttal to that is that most of the foods that don't freeze dry well or that don't freeze dry at all they have a very long shelf life anyway so let's get into the next big negative for most people and that's going to be the size of the machine so i know on video it's real hard to capture that there's a size difference in these two machines but harvest right has actually made the newer version quite a bit smaller this old machine was 20 inches wide the new one's only 18 inches wide so they've shaved off two inches just on the width they've also shaved off a couple inches on the depth uh to the door it's just over 23 inches the old one was just over 25 inches to give you a comparison a beer fridge is 21 inches it's 33 tall and about 24 deep they've also shaved off about a half an inch on the height but that would be because the old one had adjustable feet the new one does not that sounds like a positive but that's one thing that i do not like about the new machine there's no adjustable feet in the old machine you would jack up the front just a bit and that way it would allow the water to drain out the back in the new machine i believe either the trays or the chamber i can't remember which one is actually just tilted tilted down a little bit so it's supposed to remedy that i tend to get a pool of water at the bottom of mine just a little a little one at the end of the cycle still so i suppose you could just maybe shove something under there to to remedy that another big thing that i want to talk about is the quality of the machine everything is top notch as far as i'm concerned very thick metal used the fit and finish is very nice in fact from the old machine to the new machine it's even better it's less industrial looking if you look at the way the panels fit together and stuff they've gone away from the screwed in panels to a very streamlined look but the build quality overall is is very good one thing that i did not like that i didn't even mention in my first video of the old model is that they put the touchscreen down below here and i didn't like it for a couple reasons it didn't seem very convenient because you had to bend down to do whatever you were doing on here it exposed all of your electronics to the condensation from this chamber or if water ever drip down they're all right there luckily i never had any problems with it but luckily harvest right was already thinking ahead and in their new models they put the screen up above another big concern for people is going to be the power consumption of the freeze dryer i keep a pretty close watch on mine with a kilowatt meter it measures the amount of kilowatt hours it uses imagine your deep freeze it's running 24 7. there's no shutting it off but then imagine running your deep freeze for 20 to 25 years with no break which is how long your freeze-dried food is going to last all of that power is just kind of going to waste whereas the food that i have stored it's not taking up any power anymore another thing i like to think about when it comes to saving money with the harvest right that no one really talks about is rising food costs and if you imagine if you bought a steak 20 years ago the cost of that steak was x amount of dollars but if you compare that to the price of a stake now 20 years later in 2020 that price has gone up a massive percent so i'm a pretty frugal guy and i retired at the age of 40 so i really watch where my money is going if you look up the percent of inflation from year 2000 to 2020 it's increased 58 percent that's scary so way to think about that is you're kind of freezing that cost of the food that you're freeze drying for 20 years after you freeze dry it you can count on each batch to cost anywhere from a dollar to about three dollars another thing that harvest ride has improved on in their new machines is not necessarily the energy efficiency but more the batch time and how long it takes to complete i've been running these side by side now for a couple months so i've really been paying attention to how long their batch times are and it seems like the new one is probably about 30 to 40 percent faster than the old one and i heard that statistic when they first came out with the new machines and i was really really really skeptical but now that i've done it for a while i can confidently say that in most cases this is about 30 percent faster when i got the old machine three years ago with the original pump and the old software it was taking anywhere from 36 to sometimes 60 hours to do a freeze dry cycle with the new machine almost every cycle is 24 to 30 hours sometimes less and that's because of a few different reasons the firmware has been upgraded quite a few times over the last few years they started using the vacuum pump in the actual freezing cycle which would make it actually go through the freeze cycle quite a bit faster the firmware is also much more intelligent than it used to be in fact the days of fiddling with cycle times and freeze times and just really just fiddling with any of it is pretty much non-existent now it's a semi-intelligent software and really it's a it's really user friendly and it pretty much does the whole thing for you and really you can't even customize anything other than your dry temperature and then at the very end you can you can adjust your final dry time if you need to add some dry time so it really takes the guesswork out of this older model where you were always trying to find that right amount of cycle time for each cycle and the new one just does it for you so i told you it was going to be completely transparent in this video so i want to show you all the things that i've had go wrong with this old machine and then some of the things that harvest right is actually remedied to uh to fix the problems that i had in this machine in that new machine over there so we'll go in chronological order right away when i first got this machine three years ago i had an issue with this door and this is actually plexiglas it's not glass and i had some spidering going on in the plexiglas where they had drilled the holes for these mounts but harvest right fixed it right away as soon as i called them they sent me a new door i was only down and out for a couple days and i had a new one i've also replaced this hose on here so the hoses do they get bad after time that's a 15 part and it's a matter of screwing it off and screwing it back on but i also did have to replace this door seal and this is another part that just goes bad over time it's not expensive but but over time these just start to flatten out because there's so much pressure from this door and the vacuum just pulling pulling that into that seal all the time they just get bad and you might be wondering why this side panel is off on the old one that is because i had to replace just recently this little outlet right here where it actually plugs into the cord that would go into your socket and the reason for that is still unknown i don't know why the wire just failed so i put the new connector on and away i went but the biggest thing that's failed on this machine and this is a great segue into my next big negative was this pump the vacuum pumps on the harvest right have and probably always will be the weak spot of the whole system so back in the day when i ordered my pump they came with the jb eliminator and harvest right was kind of in a transitional period at that point where they were going from this jb to this newer version of the standard pump and i think the reason being because people were saying that this pump would only last about three years and lo and behold here we are three years later this pump just finally died after years and years and years three to be exact of abuse and not only did this pump go through abuse it abused me too because these old pumps used to have to be changed every single cycle you can do a cycle change the oil do a cycle change the oil and it got to the point where it was pretty annoying the most annoying thing about freeze drying but they kind of remedied that when they came out with this standard pump this ships with as a standard for all of their freeze dryers as of the time of this video this is good for four to five batches before it needs an oil change but they did one even better they now make a premier pump which is i believe a 700 upgrade in my opinion i think it's worth every penny because you only have to change the oil every 20 to 25 batches which really is only probably about 10 times a year even if you're freeze drying 24 7. i also like this pump because it's quiet which is a great segue to the next negative so a common misconception is that the freeze dryer is loud but really the freeze dryer itself is not loud it's the vacuum pump i'm gonna turn on the freeze dryer by itself and then i'll turn on both vacuum pumps so you can hear the difference in sound so to measure this i've actually put an app on my phone called sound meter as to its accuracy you know i i don't know it'll at least give you a baseline as a how much louder one pump is than the other and just kind of give you an idea of how loud the freeze dryer is because you can pick it up on my mic right here so now let's do the new freeze dryer this is just the freeze dryer running it says right around 67 to 70 decibels except for when i talk then it makes it louder okay now let's just turn on the vacuum just by itself and see what we get [Music] right about the same okay here goes the next one so this is from harvest rights website they say the standard pump is 64 decibels they say the premier oil pump is 52 decibels similar to a dishwasher real numbers this is about 62 to 65 according to this app which again i don't know how accurate it is standard pump once it gets warmed up seems like it's around like 70 to 72. there's a pretty noticeable difference between the two this one is quite a bit quieter even though the decibel meter doesn't necessarily say so i don't know if it's just the type of sound that it is but really this standard pump over the old style jb pump that i had is just a complete night and day difference so while there's some negatives that can be said about the pump situation the pump is the workhorse of the harvest right but it's also the least expensive if something goes wrong i just picked this up on ebay it's a refurbished unit for 130 so really in the scheme of things in the overall price of the freeze dryer and really the thing that's most likely to go wrong if if at all it's gonna be the vacuum pump but you can buy a new one of these for 130 or you can buy a new one i think for i don't know 250 300 300 or something like that with that being said i don't think it's an it's an accident that harvest right puts the pump as as an external part of the whole system i think that they they know that that is probably the weak spot of the system i think that it's a good thing that that's the weakest part of the system and that it is external as opposed to you know built into the system where it's tough to get to and and and really just would be more expensive to work on so i'm going to leave you with some final thoughts and hopefully i answered any kind of questions that you would have about home freeze drying whether or not the harvest right is for you is definitely going to depend on your situation you're only going to get out of this machine the effort that you put into it if you go in with a plan of food storage and you really put this machine to use and use it for its intended purposes it will more than likely meet or exceed your expectations the harvest right home freeze dryer is the only game in town there is no other home freeze drying system the only competitor is pharmaceutical or commercial and they're going to cost two thirds or maybe even more than that to get a comparable size freeze dryer so that brings me to another very good point harvest right has no reason to make these machines better but they do consistently improve these machines year after year and in my opinion that speaks to the company's dedication to their customers and what they want the customers to get out of their products so if you want more than just my opinion you can join the facebook group or the mewi group that i started you can get thousands of people's opinions thousands of people that have been freeze-drying longer than i have even there's a wealth of information on there and the freeze-drying community is very tight-knit and we welcome the new freeze dryers or people that are just curious about freeze drying also drop by the new store freeze drying supplies dot com we're a one stop shop for freeze drying supplies it's not just a clever name also if you think you're ready to take the plunge and purchase a freeze dryer i'll put my affiliate link down below that just helps us keep providing this freeze drying content and we promote the things that we love like freeze drying as always i'll put a link to the facebook and the mewy groups down in the description and if you want to come on my freeze drying journey with me you can subscribe to my channel retired at 40 live life simple i release a video once a week every sunday and you can click the bell after you subscribe to get notifications of those future videos when they come out in the meantime this is retired at 40 happy freeze drying remember to live life simple and we'll catch you next time

Channel: Retired at 40- Live.Life.Simple.

Views: 168,489

Rating: 4.9486151 out of 5

Keywords: Harvestright, harvest right freeze dryer review, harvest right freeze dryer problems, harvestright.com freeze dryer, harvest right freeze dryer, freeze dryer review, harvest right premier pump review, premier pump vs standard, harvestright freeze dryer, harvest right freeze dryer troubleshooting, harvest right freeze dryer unboxing, harvest right freeze dryer noise, harvest right freeze dryer sizes, harvest right freeze dryer vacuum test, harvest right freeze dryer oilless pump

Id: BkB_5FyY81Q

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020