Heavy Sigh

I fried the stove.
So much for preserving your own food to save money.
Are orange flames coming out out of the knob for a burner a bad thing?
Thankfully, the seals on the tomatoes I was canning at the time sealed.

I got so pissed at this whole mess that I looked up designs for making a solar dehydrator. Not the purest of logic, but it sure works as a coping mechanism...

This link has given credit where credit is due. All others don't give credit, but use the exact same wording and drawing.

So, I looked around at our boxes, and took a bunch of crap that had been saved for no particular reason and came up with the dehydrator in less than 30 minutes....

Here's the front view. The plastic I used was from the bags the grass clippers were packed in. So yes, a little wrinkly, but reused is a good thing. As I was making the collector portion of the dehydrator, the heat coming out of it was pretty intense, so am not concerned about the wrinkles.










Here, you can see the inside of the collector. If you look toward the bottom of the picture, you can see the light from the hole to let the hot air into the dryer portion. The hole to let cool air in at the bottom of the collector is large, and the hole into the dryer is small. My theory is to give it a convection type breeze. We'll see if it works.

I've got about a cup of berries in to start. The screen is from a broken window screen - metal, so no melting or outgassing. I wasn't very good at cutting the screen - it won't stay in place off the bottom of the dehydrator with the berries on it, so have a couple of cardboard pieces - very small - to help support the screen.



The back of the dehydrator - a shoe box. LOL It already had a small hole in it, so I'm using the lid to help hold the heat in, but the vent hole will keep air circulating through quite well. From bottom front to top rear will assure all of the berries will get hot air over them.