Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I absolutely love this food dehydrator! I has a much smaller one that couldn't hold much and it was frustrating to go to the effort to prep food to dry only to be able to do so little of it at a time, so I took the plunge and bought this Excalibur model and am so happy I made the change. This dehydrator fits on my kitchen counter under the cabinets just fine and it has enough capacity to do a five pound bag of sliced potatoes plus several trays of other produce at the same time. My other dehydrator could manage about 3 pounds of sliced potatoes at best, so I love having more capacity. I'm still fairly new to food dehydration so I refer to a book I bought for the proper way to prepare food items and for drying time and temperature, then I follow those directions and I'm having nothing but success so far. My other dehydrator had open plastic mesh trays that food items could fall through as they dried, but that isn't a concern thanks to the poly-screen tray inserts in this Excalibur. Now I can shred potatoes and dry them in order to have hash browns on hand whenever we want them without having them slip through the screens as they dry. By the way, we rehydrated some to see what they were like and it's like having freshly shredded potatoes. So much more useful for what we want to do than canning! (Now I have a large All American Pressure Canner I no longer want) I bought some non-stick liners to use when making fruit leather but haven't tried it yet. This dehydrator seems to get much better air flow through the trays than my other one did because vegetables are drying more quickly even though they're set at the same temperature they were in the other machine. It does produce some fan noise, but nothing that I find obnoxious. It's easy to operate, signals when the time is up, and the trays are super easy to clean up so I'm very happy with the purchase. I think small dehydrators are useful as a way to learn about dehydrating foods, but this is a model I'd recommend getting if you're serious about doing it.