AC, Yes solar is an option and one that I have used from time to time. But with as much as we have to dry we can not afford to miss a day due to clouds/rain, also we dry a lot at night while we sleep. Solar is unreliable here anyway, you CAN dry but if the sun goes behind a cloud the food soaks the moisture right back up if you aren't watching it carefully.
Colder season if fine for the extra heat but at 450watts I can use that power else where and make way more heat.
Dehydrating slower is easier in the food therefore a small, slow compressor is all that is needed. But not exactly tiny either. COP is measured by the machine it is in and the job it is doing, I do understand that a tiny compressor can in fact be too small to really handle the job it is trying to do, but I'm only trying to dry a 18"x 18" x 10" tightly sealed box.
My grandmother past away Wednesday and I needed to get my mind off things so I went to work. I got lucky this week and found a handful of free compressors, the smallest being 6.5 LRA.
I stole a evap coil out of a window unit, a condenser out of a water cooler, and a fan from a refrigerator.
I laid everything out to see how it would fit. Air enters from the food box above the unit through the evap coil and is blown over the compressor and through the condenser coils back up into the bottom of the food box. Thus continuing the loop until the food is dry.
Made me a custom drip pan for the evap. With a piece of plastic and a torch.
And here she is, at least the guts of her.
25 psi suction. 180 psi discharge. 1.5 amps.
It started poring water out with in 5 minutes of running. But I think my cap tube is to long so I'm going to cut some off and see what happens.