I have 3 food dryers with the wood fired drier being the biggest. It was made from an old refrigerator and it is a beasty looking thing. We painted it black to absorb more solar heat and it has a crooked chimney up the back side. But it dries nearly 2 bushels of corn in about 36 hours. I also have an Excalibur with 9 trays and a oven tray system. The recycled refrig is the biggest and does about 2.5 bushels food. If we don't want to do wood heat with it, we can use a propane heater to do the job.

Here's how we made it-

We gutted as much of the interior out as possible. Any plastic that remains will be a problem when drying foods at 180 F degrees or more, so take it out!

We stuck a thermometer on the side to gauge temperature and the unit up on a set of blocks high enough to get a good fire going below (thus the chimney on the back that comes out from the block). We cut some holes near the top and screened them over. One side is for air in and the other side collects fresh air to get blown to the bottom. Use either a solar fan or small computer cooling fan. If we would have just cut holes on the bottom for fresh air, I would have been collecting too much smoke from the fire, so that's why the extra work went into the interior fresh air vent.

On the inside bottom of the metal refrigerator, we placed a wheelbarrow full of bricks to hold the temperature longer at night. The rest of the space inside was divided into shelving space.

The shelves we put in are stainless steel perforated material. We found a sheet on ebay and cut and formed it. Note that perforated stainless steel has a "smooth side" from being punched. This side should be where the food goes and it makes it much easier for cleaning. The sheets have the edges bent for stability as a 2.5 foot long shelf does not support itself without it.

Without wood heating the unti, the interior gets about 127 degrees F on a full sun day so it doubles as a solar food dryer but since I want food drying for several days a week, the ability to wood fire it speeds the process along.

The first time firing this up - have some tin-foil handy since you don't want smoke leaking into the unit. You can make "rope" from tin-foil by twisting it and using it to fill gaps.

We put a table near the unit and found a rolling kitchen work cart to carry full loads of the trays. I'm happy with how the design worked and the only thing we purchased was the stainless steel sheet for the shelving.

A project for the next summer is to gut out another old metal refrigerator and turn it into a smoke house to smoke turkey, jerky, sausage and more. There are store-bought units available at out-door sporting stores and they use propane which is what I image most people would find work well for them. But when processing larger amounts of food, the bigger unit uses about the same amount of wood as we would run through a small system. And, since crab apple, maple and oak chips are available from the wood pile, why not use it?

See dehydrate2food.com for details on how to tell when food is dry enough. The wood fired food dryer does large batches, and the weight of canned food can be hard to make shelving for, storing dried food in quart jars is a perfect solution to a massive food storage system in a small place.

A little about canning

We put over 200 quarts away this year and plan to do over 400 qts next year. That's a lot of food and the greatest obsticle (other than making sure the process is sanitary) is energy. We've managed to learn methods to save time but plan on doing more canning on a wood stove next year.