Having buds hanging around air-drying for a long time is a security problem. I cooked up a bud dryer to speed up the process.



I first looked at commercially available food dehydrators, but they usually operate at 38C/100F or above. Too hot! THC starts to break down at about 29C. So, I set about making my own.

This one goes just 3 days from manicure to smoking, removing moisture so quickly that there's no possibility of mould.

It's a plastic storage box with 4 wiremesh racks hanging on open-link chains from the lid.



There is one 5" muffin fan on one end sucking air out of the box



and another fan drawing air into the box.



I have a big deep-finned aluminum heatsink bolted to the 4" fan so air is drawn through the heatsink fins and blown into the box.



There's 2 aluminum-bodied 470 ohm, 25 watt power resistors bolted to the heatsink. Temp control is by a standard incandescent light dimmer which controls power to the resistors which are wired in series.



I adjust the light dimmer control until the air temp is no more than 29C as THC begins to break down at temps any higher. It is best when first firing up this design to start at the 'off' point on the dimmer and increase the power to the resistors slowly, in 1/10 of a turn increments. You don't want to open the dimmer all the way up as it may overcurrent the resistors. If I built this over again, I'd probably increase the value of the power resistors to 1.2-1.5k ohms, but these are what I had on hand at the time!


(note thermometer temp sensor placed in the warm airflow)

This tiny bit of added heat drops the ambient air humidity enough to allow it to pick up the water out of the buds very quickly as it passes through the box. Just warming the ambient air a few degrees will reduce the relative humidity dramatically.

Buds are totally dry and ready to smoke in 3 days rain or shine, but if ambient relative humidity is very high, 80% or so, drying time can stretch out to 4 days.

The dryer CAN overdry buds if I'm not careful, but that's solved by putting a teaspoon of water on a paper towel and nesting it in the buds for a couple of hours until they are nice and springy again.

There is a UV ioniser placed a few feet away from the dryer to kill scents, but the high volume of airflow through the dryer itself does a lot to reduce that musty, dank perfume.

This old dryer is cracked, beat-up, covered in resin goo, was really only a prototype I never got around to building properly- and is generally filthy. But the damn thing works and keeps working. Moreover, it's usually in constant service and has been for about 5 years.

There's dozens of ways to build this- almost anything similar will work. Just mind the current you throw into the resistors and keep a close watch on the air temp coming from the warmer- hold it to 29C.

oh, i bet that weed just taste sooooooo yummy. crumbs up real nice. i know a guy that would love this.

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i'm the guy i've always wanted to be

Very impressive.

this looks good but, is the weed still of same quality? i know thc levels wont be effected but is taste and/or the bud itself any different?

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very neat setup, I think I will cobble together something similar

Taste is just the same as hang dried except that there's no possibility of mould... and I really hate the taste of mould- and can pick it up in tiny amounts. The humidity around here is often so high that hang-drying can take a couple of weeks, meaning there's always a tiny hint of mould in my hang-dried buds.

The texture of buds run through my dryer is no different to hang-dried. I dry them until there is just a little bit of springyness left in the buds, not quite to the point where they crumble or break apart.

Keep in mind that my homebuilt job doesn't heat to the high temps used in normal food dehydrators. Weed dried in a food dehydrator WILL come out harsh, crumbly and overdried because food dehydrators are too damn hot.

I thought about modifying the heating element in a regular food dehydrator to cool it down, but then I went shopping for one- and found they get $150-250 for a new dehydrator! I built my own for under $40, might have cost a bit more if I had not pulled some stuff out of my junkbox for it. The biggest food dehydrator I could find was also less than 1/3 the size of my jerry-rigged dryer.

Thanks, mogie. You're being very kind to my slacker engineering efforts!

The stuff that comes out of this dryer is nicer than hang dried as it can't possibly have any mould.

You can vary the smoking smoothness of any buds by varying how much water you leave in the buds. Slightly moist buds smoke smoother because they burn cooler.

It's possible to overdry with my dryer, but as said before, it's very easy to put a little water back in by nesting a paper towel with a teasoon of water in the buds for an hour or two.

Thanks. It's very easy to make something that works well.

Would recommend that if you use a plastic storage tub, use a 'hot knife' to cut the holes for the fans. A jigsaw will crack and shatter the cheap plastic. You can make a hot knife by hammering a soldering iron tip flat. Will melt nice neat bolt holes and cut the large circles with ease.

If you find that the 25watt power resistors are too expensive (about $15 each but free for this project out of my junkbox), you can use a 25-30 watt soldering iron element firmly clamped to the heatsink instead. I've seen soldering irons for $7-10.

correction... I just found an old photo of this dryer in operation back in 2000- it has been in use for 7 years.

I don't even want to know how much dope this thing has processed! It would be a whole lot!

I've had as much as 16oz dry weight come out of it in 3 days, all racks loaded to capacity in a single layer.

all right i'm an old school 2 week cure kinda guy. but the hot knife now that's something i can use. thank you.

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i'm the guy i've always wanted to be

Nothing wrong with the 2-wk cure as long as you have reliably low-humidity ambient air to dry it in. Rains a lot here, so I needed to make my own low-humidity air.

So it happens, a dryer is faster than hang drying and the air motion alone suppresses mould. Because I'm limiting temp to 29C/84F, this dryer is not much different than hang drying on a warm, dry, windy summer day. It's worlds different from a commercial food dryer at ~100-140F.

The hot knife thang is a good trick. Definitely an outdoor job, tho. The plastic smoke is wicked. If you're clever, you can wire a dimmer into a power outlet strip and use that to vary the temperature of the soldering iron element to reduce smoking.