FYI on dehydrators: Commercial Food, Fruit, Beef Jerky Dehydrator & Dryer - Drying Herbs & Fruits – Excalibur Dehydration

I have the same security issues. My solution: buds drying in between newspapers in the oven. 10-14 days.

Thanks for the linkage, silk.

One thing I notice from all those commercial dehydrators is how much heating power they have - anywhere from 220W to 600W. Lots of watts, probably very good for making beef jerky. However, I seriously doubt any of the commercial units will be adjustable down to 29C, which is the very maximum temp you want to expose buds to while drying or storing. Throwing 600W into a load of buds would very quickly destroy the THC and turn the buds crumbly.

My dryer only puts 25W worth of power at maximum (more than that should pop the resistors) into the air which runs through the buds. When ambient temperature is about 24C, it only takes about 10-15W to raise the temp to 29C.

I had considered modifying a commercial dehydration unit by putting a high-power incandescent dimmer unit in series with the heating element to limit the max temp, but the cost to buy a new dehydrator unit was far, FAR in excess of what I could build one for.

You might think about trying a reversible mod to your dryer to convert it to crossflow.

If the fans are already on opposite ends of the box, tape shut your 13 holes with some staunch duct tape (from inside and out) and turn one of the fans around backwards so you have one pumping air in and one pulling it out. I think you'll find that this will speed up the drying even without adding any heat to your intake air. Even the motion of the airstream hitting the water molecules on the bud material, without any added heat, will help speed the evaporation.

The fan locations are important- it wouldn't work too well if the in & out fans were right next to one another- the main stream of air would travel by the shortest, lowest resistance path from one fan to the other. The mass of buds should be right in the midst of the airstream for best effect.

Lemme know how you go.

Maybe my link wasn't clear, those excalibur dehydrators can go down to below 19C which is lower than my air drying method which is around 23C. I'm actually gonna pick one up for other uses but I'll give it a try with buds sometimes. I don't really have a mold threat in my home, particularly in the oven!

Thanks for the info, but where are you getting the 19C figure from? The small units on the page you linked all have a note saying 'adjustable thermostat' but only the $5000 'professional' unit gives a temp range (specifies "80F-200F+"). The 'pro' unit sure looks nice, though! If it can maintain 29C/84F, it's just the ticket!

I'm sure the other units can either go down close to 29C or could be modified to do so, but they're all priced at a lot more than you'd spend for a slapdash converted storage box special.

I admit to being both lazy and cheap, but I think I'm cheaper than I am lazy.

This page from the Excalibur FAQ says the adjustable range is 95F-145F.

FAQs Regarding Excalibur Dehydrator

Just a LITTLE too hot for buds. If it could only come down 10 more degrees F, it'd be the shit.

Al B. Fuct drop the company an e-mail. They will tell you you can get below 70F on it. I know two foodies that own the retail models and have dehydrated below 70F.

al b.

hello again. are there any draw backs of speeding up the drying process? ive read in some places it can possibly take away potency.

No prob- they ought to put that on their website, though. It's good info that some of their potential customers (like us) could put to good use!

This is THE most common question about my dryer. I've answered it a few times already, but I'll go through it once more with feeling!

The only way to reduce the potency with a dryer/dehydrator is to exceed the temp at which THC breaks down (29C). Most commercial dehydrators operate at much higher than 29C, but silk has found some commercially made units which will go down to 29C.

When you find references to dehydrators damaging the potency of buds, they are generally talking about commercial dehydrators which most often run hotter than needed for buds.

There's no magic in drying buds. Nothing happens in hang-drying which actually requires 2 weeks of hang-time before smoking. You're not dealing with fermentation, which does require some amount of time to work correctly. Whether you're hang-drying or using my dryer (or an equivalent which does not exceed 29C), these methods only remove water, more or less quickly, nothing else. My dryer is designed to remove water from buds as quickly as it can be done without raising the air temp above 29C.

My dryer is very specifically designed for buds. It puts out only a very small amount of heat. The temp is easily controllable via the highly stable dimmer module, down to 1/10 of a degree C.

If you knew the precise resistance value needed to raise the temp of the air coming off the heatsink to 29C (based upon your local line voltage), you could eliminate the dimmer module. However, I haven't calculated these values. These values would vary quite lot with different sized heatsinks and fans, so I have not bothered. With the dimmer, the circuit as drawn above will work for 110V-240V AC. You just have to manually set the temp.

However, it's possible to add a thermostat to mind the max air temp for you. Just wire a t'stat from a broken aquarium heater in series with the dimmer unit and put the thermostat in the warm air stream. Set the thermostat until the max temp is 29C- and forget about it. A thermostat will shut off current to the resistors on the heatsink when temps exceed the 29C limit, but the fans will keep running. This method is useful when your ambient air temps get close to 28-29C. If your ambient air temps don't usually get close to 29C, you will do fine with no thermostat, just using the dimmer to set the max temp.