>> In today's video,
we're going to show you how to make a food dehydrator.
It can be used to make a number of tasty snacks,
and it's built from a cardboard box, a light bulb, and a small fan.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
[Music]
To start off with the build of this food dehydrator,
we're going to want a cardboard box,
some aluminum foil, and some strong tape.
If you have some of this metal tape,
that will work the best.
But if you don't have any of this,
other strong tape like duct tape will work as well.
There's no specific size or shape of cardboard box that you need,
but I have this one because it fits really well with the racks
that we'll fit inside of it.
This box used to hold reams of paper, and if you don't have one lying around,
I went to a store that sells paper, and they sold this box to me for a dollar.
This is a 250 watt heat lamp bulb,
and this is an old cooling fan from a computer.
If you don't have one, you can buy a heat bulb
at most hardware stores for about 10 bucks.
Sometimes they have a red color to them,
but they'll work just the same as this one.
Here's the basic idea of how our food dehydrator will work.
Both of these will be inside our box, which would be lined with foil.
The heat from the lamp will be circulated by the air from the fan,
and that will swirl slowly around the food that we're dehydrating,
drying it out.
The first step will be to use our aluminum foil and our tape
to line the inside of the box and the inside of the lid with the foil,
shiny side out.
[Music]
There we go.
The inside of our box in our lid is now completely lined with foil.
And you can see how shiny and reflective it is in there.
That's really going to help the heat bounce around
and not get absorbed by the cardboard of the box.
Now it's time to move on to adding the fan and the heat lamp.
This fan came out of an old computer,
and runs on 12 volt DC current.
To power this 12 volt DC fan, I went to the local thrift shop,
and just bought a used power supply.
This power supply has an output of 12 volts DC current.
So it should run our fan just perfectly.
Before we permanently solder anything together,
let's just do a quick test to see if our power supply is working.
I've got it plugged in right now.
I think this will only work one direction with the wires.
Well, it's working that direction.
Definitely getting a breeze off of that.
So now we can solder those together to make the connection permanent.
[Music]
Our fan is wired and ready to go.
So now we need to install it in the box.
And we're actually going to keep the box oriented like this.
Our lid isn't going to work as a lid, but instead is going to work as a door.
So we want our fan installed into the side of the box.
And since this is going to be the bottom,
we'll put the fan right here.
I've got it elevated up from the edge just a little bit
to avoid the overlapping piece of cardboard here.
It doesn't really matter exactly where you put it,
as long as it's on about the bottom half of the box.
[Music]
With the hole cut to the fan,
it may be a good idea to take a little bit more tape
and tape down these edges.
If you've cut the hole to the right size,
the fan should fit nicely into place.
Now that we've got the fan installed,
we want to install the heat lamp on the other side of the box.
To power the heat lamp,
I have this chord that's just a chord on one side
and a light bulb socket on the other.
And this would work if we didn't want an on or off switch,
or the ability to choose how much power came out of this bulb.
But I want both of those things.
I want to be able to turn off the light, and I want to be able to turn it down.
So here I have a rotating dimmer switch.
We're going to install this into the middle of the power cord.
These two wires are the positive and negative lines,
and we'll have one of the wires running through our power cord,
connect into one side and out the other.
I've cut the power cord to the light bulb
and exposed the ends of the two wires
so we can now solder them in line with the light switch.
We'll solder the two black wires back together,
and then we'll take the white wire and have that split,
so it connects to the red wire on one side of light switch
and the black wire on the other.
[Music]
Looks like it's working to me.
Now, before I solder anything in place,
we do need to run this wire through the other wall of this box.
Otherwise, we would have to have a really big hole for the light bulb
to fit in and out.
So let's cut a hole just large enough
for this cord to fit through the wall of the box.
[Music]
Beautiful.
Heat lamp is now on a dimmable circuit.
And we can turn it off.
There's a very good chance that we could use the heat lamp
in our box just like this,
and nothing would ever be a problem with it.
But just to be sure we don't have too much heat passing
from the bulb through the foil into the cardboard,
let's use a little bit of a hanger to build a stand
that will hold our bulb up off of the foils,
just a little bit.
[Music]
This sort of double m shape does a good job of holding the bulb
off of the bottom of the box,
which should allow circulation all around it
and prevent any overheating.
The dehydrator is coming along nicely.
And at this point, what it needs is somewhere to put
the food that's being dehydrated.
These cooling racks I got at Walmart for about $3.50 each were great.
These racks are one of the reasons I got this size of box.
They fit really nicely in with just a little bit of extra space to spare.
And there's enough clearance above the light bulb
that we can easily fit two racks in here,
one on top of the other.
To be able to hold the racks right where we need
and still be able to take them in and out
of our dehydrator whenever we want,
let's use a couple of dowels running across our whole dehydrator.
[Music]
I'll put one rack about this high,
and the other one, maybe an inch and half below that.
[Music]
As you can see, these racks do extend slightly beyond the front of this box.
But we don't have to put this lid on all the way.
It overlaps with the main body of the box,
3 inches normally,
and we just don't need it to do that.
As long as it's covering the openings,
it's going to work just fine.
To help the lid stay in place approximately where we want it,
let's use a little bit of tape as a sort of hinge on one side of the box.
[Music]
Our dehydrator is just about ready to use.
There's just a couple more small improvements we can make.
First off, we want that fan to actually be circulating the air,
and not just be spinning in dead space.
So let's cut several small holes into the top of our box.
This will help the air come in one side,
travel up past the food,
carrying away any excess moisture,
and out the top.
[Music]
The dehydrator would work great just as it is,
but to contain our switch and to keep it from flopping around,
and just lying wherever on the table,
let's grab a scrap of cardboard and build a box that it can sit on
to hold all of the excess cord,
And so we just have a nice place
where we always know the switch is going to be.
[Music]
At this point, our dehydrator box is complete.
The whole thing is lined with foil.
We have a fan,
we have a light that's on a dimmer switch,
and all we need to do is pick our food and put it in.
With the front of the box closed, I can feel the air coming up
out of the holes we've cut into the top.
And once we turn on the light, the air inside will start heating up.
To make our dehydrator look just a little bit less like a cardboard box,
we're going to hit it with a layer of paint.
[Music]
Obviously, this level of decoration is not necessary to make it work.
It will dehydrate your food just fine without any changes to it,
even if it just looks like a cardboard box.
Really quick,
let's take a look at some of the things
that we can make with our Dehydro-tron 5000.
I've got three different things here that I've dehydrated at home
and it worked really well.
I have some pineapple which I covered in sugar
before putting in the dehydrator.
Some apple slices, which I just sliced in pieces.
Put on the rack and then left it overnight.
And I have some beef jerky.
There are tons of good recipes for making beef jerky at home
using a dehydrator.
It's fast, it's easier,
and it's way cheaper than buying it at the store.
[Music]
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