Is it safe to leave my food dehydrator on overnight?

[LoveIsGood]

There's nothing on the Excalibur Web site about this, and my husband's a little worried. Is it safe to leave food dehydrators on unattended? I am dehydrating my first ever homemade flax cracker @ 110 degrees.

Thanks!

[Shuu]

Shouldn't be a problem. Many recipes require 12 or more hours for dehydrating. I prefer to dehydrate overnight so no one is annoyed with the sound.

[Aleesha Sattva]

do you leave your fridge plugged in?

LOL yup it's totally fine!!!

[blaqberry]

Haahaha! :D


do you leave your fridge plugged in?

LOL yup it's totally fine!!!

[blaqberry]

Yes, it should be just fine :) ...I remember when we first got our dehydrator, think I was kinda concerned about that too. We let ours run all day or night, no prob.

Good fortune on your first batch! Maybe if you get the chance, let us know how it turns out.

[rawererin]

Yep I do it all the time

[raven]

Yes, it should be, as long as their are no problems with your wiring, as with any other appliance. You wouldn't be able to dehydrate if you didn't leave it running during the night, as many recipes take 12-18 hours to dehydrate.

Suzy

[DawnW]

Noise.....HA!

I was just joking yesterday with DH (just got my dehydrator yesterday and ran it) that I am so glad we made sure we bought a quiet dishwasher! :D

Dawn

[Revvell]

Well, that would depend on how you prefer your food. Don't do it and you'll have moldy something. Do it and you'll have crackers (or whatever you're making).:p

[Pitaya]

yes i do it all the time.......safer and cheaper than the oven on electricity too!

[Diana Cda]

I do this all the time. I don't mind leaving it on overnight at all. What I don't like to do is to leave it on when I'm not home. But then, I only leave the fridge and TV and radios alone. Everything else I turn off, in general. Most of the time I even turn the computer off, too! But anything with a heat element (my water distiller, dehydrator) get turned off. hth :)

[DawnW]

Another question along these same lines.....

what do you do when it is bedtime and your food isn't "done?"

I tried some fruit leather yesterday. I left it in the dehydrator for about 8 hours. It was bedtime and it was not finished! The bottom was gooey and messy and it didn't peel off by the time I got to the middle.

I figured it really only needed about 4 more hours max but I had no intention of getting up at 2am to turn it off.

Can I just leave it the extra 4 hours (for my 8 hours of sleep) or was I correct in taking it out and not finishing it????

Thanks,

Dawn

[Diana Cda]

You know, that's a good question. I don't know what anyone else has done, but in my case, though it rarely happens, I'll either turn down the dehydrator temp to very low (95 deg is what I consider low since I tend to dehydrate at 118 deg F), or stop the drying process and then resume when I get home the next evening.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND EITHER, by the way, as a _general_ approach, it's just what I do since I tend to only dehydrate whole foods. I don't dry much in the way of mixtures (i.e., burgers and such whose ingredients are all ground up). I have had little success, even with the higher initial temperature that Excalibur has tested, that we then reduce. No mixture that results has ever turned out to be safe for me. ALL of them have made me very ill when consumed past an hour or two after drying. I've tried everything for years! Even freezing immediately after the food has cooled down enough to safely do so did not stop the fermentation process. The last 2 times I forced the issue anyway, I threw up at work. There is simply too much moisture. The only thing safe has turned out to be things that are dried till there is no moisture left, like crackers. But stopping midway for a ground-up mixture such as crackers would also allow them to ferment enough while the dehydrator was off to create a problem, so still no-go for something like this.

I tend to dehydrate whole nuts and stuff, or leafy herbs. Since the food is whole and almost always quite dry when I've shut off the dehydrator, the odd time that this happened, I didn't feel it dangerous to do this. Since these are not meat products and they are whole foods, they're still drying with the dehydrator off (a lot of people dry herbs at room temperature) and I just resume when I get back home. But that is my choice due to what I am drying.

For ground up stuff like leathers where fermentation would be a problem, too, one would probably have to decide to either refrigerate the unfinished leathers and then resume later, or to turn the dehydrator down low enough and continue on throughout the night till morning. But this is just a thought.

But I cannot "recommend" either approach as I have not tested what happens to food that one stops dehydrating mid-way. If we had empirical evidence to say for sure, then I'd say go for it.

What does anyone else think is best?

Again, whole foods, such as soaked, sprouted whole seeds and intact herb leaves, I feel no qualms about restarting up the drying process after an interruption. I have never suffered from eating those foods and I do not make a habit of this.

Good luck whatever you decide to do in such a situation. I do hope I've helped, though I'm not sure I have except perhaps to share what has happened to me and my conclusions after years of dehydrating "failures". Cheers. :)