Bulbs & Fittings Ideas

This dehydrator rocks. I use it to make raw foods such as crackers & crusts and to dry sprouted seeds and nuts. It has worked well for my needs, feeding 2 people. The 4-tray unit may be too small for a family doing a lot of dehydrating. This unit doesn’t have a timer. That’s no problem, though. I just plug it into a grounded heavy-duty appliance timer. For the raw foodist, I recommend the Excalibur’s square shaped drying surface design over the the round shaped dehydrators. I haven’t purchased the rather pricey ParaFlexx sheets, but they would be handy for dehydrating things like spreads, yogurt, runny things, & thin crackers. The 4-tray unit dimensions are 16 1/2″L X 13″W X 6″H (Sorry, I’m metric illiterate). All dehydrator fans are going to make noise. I do not consider the 4-tray unit to be loud.

I left a review for this product back in March but somehow it was moved to another listing. I’ll attempt leaving the review again with the hopes of saving another unsuspecting buyer from wasting his/her money:

I don’t have a lot of space and thought that this 4 tray dehydrator would be the perfect solution. This thing is JUNK!!! The temperature control is completely inaccurate. On top of that, it only worked about 10 times before the heat failed completely. I tried the reset instructions to no avail. I then called the company and they made some excuse about the “rare” need for fuse replacement. The rep convinced me that it was a fluke and that the machine would most likely never need another fuse. I wanted to protect my investment so decided to chance it. It cost about for the fuse/shipping. Installation instructions were fairly straight forward though it took some hassle to get everything back in place. I used the machine about 8-10 more times before it died again. What a complete waste of money— I wish I had never purchased this product. I called the company and they offered (at full charge) to send me another fuse or I could send the product to them for repair. The cost to ship there and back plus the outrageous repair fee would equal close to what I paid for the thing in the first place. When you look inside, this thing is built like one of those light-bulb-on-a-battery things you throw together as a kid. That would be a bonus if the parts and repair were priced in accordance. This company knows how to make lots of money. I wish they had the same ambition when it came to making a decent product. I’m going back to the model at my local store. Those round tray versions get a lot of bad mouthing by this company. Maybe that’s because they actually LAST and they also cost (for the entire unit) only slightly more than the puny fuse in the Excalibur. Don’t fall for the marketing hype like I did. This company does not stand by its product.

If you do a Google search, which I should have done up front, you will see that the temperature control on these units is awful.

I have to crank mine up all the way to 145F to get the internal temp up to 100F (not even warm enough to dry without spoiling.)

Older Excaliber units were very good. As is the case with so many companies today, manufacturing has gone down hill. Fewer and fewer new purchasers are pleased with this product. I wish I had kept my shipping material. Lesson learned.