I'm using my new solar dehydrator, and it worked great on herbs and hot peppers. But now I'm drying fruit and I'm worried it won't work with these. All my nectarine slices were moldy! Overnight! :cry: I had to throw them away. The banana slices are very sticky. The apple slices seem to be drying with no misshap.

How long should I expect these things to take until they are completely dry? Is mold a usual problem?

You could try rinsing your nectarine slices in lemon juice, before dehydrating them. Also, you could rinse them in a very dilute solution of sodium hypochlorite -- household bleach without added fragrance. You can get the formula for how many drops from an eyedropper, for each gallon of water. Some municipal tap water may already have enough chlorine.

Just leave your slice of fruit in the bleach solution for about a minute. Pick it up with tongs that have been sitting in a slightly stronger bleach solution for 5 minutes, then rinsed off, and not touched.

Thanks for those suggestions, soilman - I think I'll try the lemon juice, I'm not a fan of chlorine...

One of the nectarines I cut up had a moldy spot that I cut off, but I think the spores got on the rest of the fruit. I'm trying again with fruit that doesn't have any mold, so I hope it goes better this time.

My latest experiments have worked very well, no mold! I think the mold came entirely from the one moldy nectarine.

Sweet potatoes dried very quickly.

Good stuff Ludi. I'm glad that worked out.

Hey Soilman, how about vinegar? Would that work too. I like vinegar as a mold eliminator better than bleach. But maybe there's something wrong with it???

Vinegar and bleach work in different ways. Vinegar kills stuff through acidity, bleach kills stuff through reactivity (chlorine is a very reactive chemical, AFAIK second only to fluorine). I don't know enough biology to say whether vinegar would be as effective for killing bacteria, but I guess the question becomes, what types of resistances do household bacteria have. I'm sure there are lots of bacteria that die from low molar acids, but there's also lots of types that don't.

Is this a homebuilt solar dehydrator? Or a commercial one?

It's a homebuilt, from these plans:

http://www.littlecolorado.org/solar.htm

My husband improved it by adding a fan run by a little photovoltaic panel.

Here's the dehydrator: