Customer Reviews

Excalibur 9 Tray Dehydrator - ED 2900 Dehydrater - Jerky Maker Food Dehydrator Excaliber

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I had a Ronco dehydrator and needed to move up. I work all week and could only prepare foods to dry on the weekend. We get an organic farm share each week and my family was having trouble eating and processing it all before the next batch arrived. Once I got the Excalibur 9 tray, I was able to get all of my food dried with NO LOSS OF BATCHES. This thing has a thermostat and fan instead of relying on convection alone, so it works much more quickly. Now my family has gone RAW, and we make all sorts of food in the Excalibur. We use it several times per week and it is plainly AWESOME!!! This is what you need if you are really serious about drying foods or eating raw. Don't mess around - get the 9 tray and make BIG batches and save a lot of time.

OK, let's clarify the amount of noise this machine puts out ... it is equivalent to the sound of the exhaust fan in our bathroom ceiling. It makes NO more noise than our dishwasher.

Yes, it's a bit distracting if you are watching TV, but it's nothing that should stop you from getting this 9-tray machine. (We moved it from our kitchen to our garage because we have a small kitchen and needed the counter space. The noise was not a deciding factor.)

It is absolutely WONDERFUL!

We dehydrate chicken and beef for ourselves and our dog so that we NO LONGER have to purchase expensive, irradiated jerky made in China. (We can season it however we want to, with ingredients that we can tolerate in our digestive tracts - in other words, we no longer suffer from gastric disturbances.) We have also dehydrated pineapple rings and tomatoes.

It's easy and fun, plus saves money. We run a batch at least once per week, sometimes more.

I researched dehydrators for quite a while because I only wanted to buy ONE and keep it for a long while. This is the machine to go with - the fan and heating element are on the back wall of this unit versus on the bottom like in other machines. Therefore, the drippings stay out of the mechanical workings and do NOT effect the durability of the machine.

I highly recommend the 9-tray model so that you can accomplish a lot of dehydrating within a minimal amount of space vs. 2 of the 4-tray models - they would need to be set side-by-side as the heat would be a concern if they were stacked directly on top of each other. I would only consider stacking the units if you had a SHELF in-between them.

The Excalibur is easy to clean and easy to use. I give it my highest satisfaction rating, and encourage anyone who wants a quality dehydrator to purchase this one.

I use this machine all the time and am so glad to have the full 9 tray version! I really do use all those trays quite often, making my own nutritious snacks that I can baggie up and eat later at home or on the go. It also fills my home with the scent of whatever I'm dehydrating at the time (which is generally some kind of delicious fruit)... very pleasant to come home to.

It's true, this is an awesome machine. Very fast, fairly even drying, large trays, huge capacity. My main complaint is that the fan is rather loud, and when it's on for many hours in a row it's a bit grating. Don't bother with the Paraflexx sheets for fruit leather - unbleached silicone parchment paper (NOT waxed paper) is faster and less expensive, and you can just cut and store the finished leather with the paper still on.

Don't get me wrong - Excalibur makes the most wonderful dehydrators. They're the only ones on the market that allow you to dry tall things, like tomato halves and raw breads. But this 9 tray one is SO LOUD that I cannot recommend it unless you have a service porch or someplace close to the kitchen with a door that closes off the sound from the rest of the house. It is far too loud to use in the average kitchen. I should have kept my 4 tray one and simply bought another. The smaller ones make some noise, too, but at least it's bearable.

So, being totally sold on my Mom's dehydrated persimmons, I decided I had to have my own dehydrator. After doing a fair amount of research about quality and pricing, I chose the Excaliber 9-tray mostly for the capacity and horizontal fan. Because of the reviews I had read and the price of the Excaliber, I assumed it would be a superior product to those that sold for 1/3 the price.

On the day I received the dehydrator I was so excited that I went to the store and bought a ton of fruit to dry. I spent a couple of hours washing, trimming and slicing before happily filling and starting the dehydrator, and the fan started with no problems. The sound was not too loud for me.

The next morning I eagerly checked the fruit and it had a sticky, unusual texture that was not at all what I had expected. Some was quite wet, so I left it on all day while I went to work.

That evening when I returned home and checked the fruit, there was little change. I felt outside the dehydrator and could feel no heat, so I turned the temperature to its maximum setting, and still felt no heat. I felt inside, even next to the heating coil, and there was no heat. I found the little manual that was included and, in the back in the troubleshooting section, there was listed a series of instructions to follow if the heating coil did not work. It said to turn the temperature knob to each setting, pausing at each, then continuing on this way throughout all the settings. It said to do this 40 times! My husband was aggravated that I was actually spending the time to turn the
knob this way 40 times, but I did it anyway, because I needed to be able to tell the seller I followed their instructions, rediculous as they were. The manual said if this did not work then the fuse was blown and I needed to order another one from them.

The next morning, I contacted the Amazon seller, Wheatgrasskits, by phone and was told that the agreement they have with Excaliber is to refer all customer complaints directly to Excaliber. So, I called Excaliber. Yep, the first thing they start telling me to do is to turn the knob the 40 times, etc. When I described to them all I'd done, I
was told that the fuse was bad and that they'd send me a new one with instructions on how to replace it.

I asked the gentleman if it seemed unusual to him that the fuse was already bad on a brand new unit that had never been used, and was told it's not unusual! So I said ok and figured, how difficult can it be to replace a fuse?

A few days later, after all the fruit I'd bought to dry had spoiled, I received a package that included a new thermostat and a new fuse, along with several pages of instructions for replacing each. After reading over the instructions, I decided that the thermostat would probably be the easiest, because the fuse was not in the proper shape and had to be properly bent with needle-nosed pliers and I didn't have any.

So, I took the whole thing apart, removed the screws holding in the thermostat, removed the wires, which were a little different from the diagram in the instructions, and attached the new thermostat, replacing the wires and screws. I plugged it in before reassembling and the heating coil still did not work.

The fuse was very difficult for me, as the wire part that had to be bent was stiff and I could not get it into the proper shape, which was sort of like a U with curly tips, with the curls the right size to fit around some little screws and be secured in. After fighting with it for an hour or so I had the fuse in and plugged it in, and the coil immediately got red. YES! So, I put it all back together and plugged it in and no heat. ARGH! I took it all apart again and wiggled the little fuse wires around on the little screws and got it a little tighter. I tried it out
again and it heated. When I put it together this time it seemed to work. I say "seemed" because the coil wasn't turning red after I put the fan blade back on. After removing the fan blade several times and replacing there was no change. I decided to go ahead and reassemble and try to dry something.

The dehydrator did have heat when I tried it out on a few fruit so I guess I'll try again to use it.

Regarding quality of this dehydrator, I know very well how crappily it's made since I've taken it apart so many times.

Regarding customer service, I spent over 2 hours installing their new parts for them on a unit that did not function when it was shipped and had a bloody hand from scraping it on wire parts. I don't have a very high opinion of their customer service!

I cannot recommend purchasing this product to anyone.

I bought the unit with the timer and ?upgraded? modules.
Bought directly from the factory. Received in short order.

This does a good job when working. Mine quit heating
after 3 uses. Customer service will talk to you on the
phone, but don't know anything. Tech rep will call you
when they're ready. (They never got ready to call me)

I was told my only choice was to wait for the rep to call and
it may take 2-3 days. I chose to return it, of course you
have to pay return freight and 15% restocking fee for this
POS, but at least I don't have to deal with the clowns in
Sacramento anymore. Went to Cabelas and bought the commercial
12 tray for [...] bucks more........ much higher quality and
the features are wonderful i.e. digital timer, thermostat and
gives you exact timing, how much time left, set temp and actual
temp.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from Excalibur. No instruction
or parts manual either and you can not buy parts except from them.
(even the fuse)

This is a very good product for dehydration of food. Volume of food that can be dehydrated at one shot is good - I dehydrated 5 lbs of beef jerky in one cycle, and also dehydrated about 25 fairly large apples in one cycle. The unit has a fairly large footprint, so we store it in the basement when not using to conserve our counter space. The unit is light though, so it is not much trouble to bring it up to use. Not very noisy either... less than our dishwasher for sure!

I use to burn out lots of the round dehydrators you can buy at Target, or similar stores. I make a lot of Beef Jerky and the drippings would get into the fan/heating elements (located at the base), eventually leading to cracking and malfunctions (smoking).
After a lot of research I decided to go with the 9 tray Excalibur. This unit is AWESOME!! You can dehydrate anything! I had so many hot peppers from my garden this year that I just cut them in half and dried them out. You can also dehydrate larger items by skipping a tray or two, something you cannot do in the round types. Since the trays are square you do not have to twist and finagle (sp) beef an other products like the round ones.
As stated by someone else in these reviews the fan and heater are located on the back, so they stay clean. It does have a large footprint and is about as noisy as our hood over the oven, not overly annoying but not super quiet either. Definitely worth every penny if you make a lot of jerky or like to preserve your summer bounty from the garden!

I started with the 9-tray Excalibur and it was too noisy for my small home. I sold it to a friend with a porch and bought the 4-tray model, which is much quieter.