Last year Jen and I spent quite a bit of time going up to Green Bluff north of Spokane, WA and picking fruit. This was such a wonderful experience and gave us quite the appreciation for fruit picked ripe off the tree/plant. Nothing beats it! It gave us a great reference point for just how lame typical grocery store bought fruit/vegetables are. But, like some things in life, it comes with a bad side. Most of the fruit at Green Bluff is not organic. So we compromised. At this point in time and for this situation, we are putting local food above organic. It’s not organic but it didn’t have to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles to get to our home. We definitely would like the best of both worlds and we are continually on the lookout.
I do have to give props to one grower at Green Bluff, Vern and Nancy Fallstrom at Strawberry Hill Farm.
They do what they call nutritional farming. My understanding of it is that they are organic but not certified. That’s a drastically oversimplified explanation of it. If you want more information, I recommend talking to Vern. He’s a great guy with a wealth of information. Jen and I will keep going back to his place for as long as we can. His farm is definitely a farm we’ll try to model our garden after.
So back to the point. With all this great fruit on our hands, we looked at our options of preserving it which were canning, freezing, and drying. We went out and bought an electric food dryer. One of the round ones with all the plastic trays. Well, after using this thing, we realized that some of the wetter fruit took over a day to dry with this thing on constantly. UGH! Also, it tended to dry unevenly from the top to the bottom and it didn’t hold too much fruit. It would cost us from $1-2 per day to run in electricity. Not too bad but it was added cost.
So off to the land of information, Google. Heck, within about 10-15 minutes of the internet-space-time-continuum ( 2-3 hours realtime) we had a plan to build a Solar Dehydrator. Here’s the plans that I worked from Solar Fruit Dryer PDF.
I neatly tucked these plans in the back of my head in the engineering box and mulled them over during the winter months. Actually, I forgot all about it until Jen said in the spring, “Okay, we need to build the solar dehydrator.” Then my brain sprung into action and came up with a plan in a couple of days.
I modified the designs to fit our needs. Basically, instead of the dehydrator being 4’ x 4’, we made it 3’ x 4’. Also, I modified the lid to use plexiglass instead of plastic film and I put some wheels on it for ease of moving around. TRUST ME, you want to make the effort to put wheels on it. It’s quite simple and it makes WAY easier to move around. With wheels, one person can easily move it around to face the sun throughout the day. Without wheels, you’d need two people to move it and that would get annoying.
Jen and I are all about sustainable living. Thus the name of this blog. But that is only the first part. More importantly than living sustainably ourselves, we try to encourage everyone to do the same and give them freely the information they need to do so. Leading by example is our goal. Therefore, we constantly try to document everything we do so others can do it also.
We didn’t do a great job of documentation when we built our chicken coop (which will be posted soon). So this solar dehydrator is our first good venture into a complete project.
A few things about the project. The measured drawings are done by me. Amateur! I’m not a CAD expert. Though, I’m pretty proud of my results for a first try. Last time I did any CAD drawings was back in college about 9 years ago. I have no idea how much the whole project cost us but I’d be willing to be it was under $100. I had to get VERY creative with the tools I used. I don’t have much in the way of fancy tools ( I’m crossing my fingers hoping that will change over the next few years ). The main tools I used were a brad gun (borrowed), circular saw, c-clamps (borrowed), tape measure, pencil, drill, miter saw, and my brain (sometimes this one malfunctioned).
Please feel free to ask questions or point out mistakes. But most importantly, BE SAFE and wear protective gear especially Safety Glasses!!!!!
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