If you are thinking of buying a food dehydrator, always choose one that has a fan on top and has temperature control. Nesco FD-75A has both features on-board. You can easily dry fruits, vegetable and jerky in a few hours. Flavors don’t get mixed with this product. The best part of this food dehydrator is the top-mounted fan. Top-mounting prevents liquids from dropping into the heater chamber. Temperature control allows you to fine tune the heat for better results. Nesco FD-75A comes with 5 trays, you can expand it up to 12 for drying larger quantities. It also comes with two fruit roll sheets, two Clean-A-Screen flexible screens, three original jerky spice packets and a 52 page instruction and recipe book. The whole unit weighs around 9 pounds. It has 1 year limited warranty
I tried this one with my beef jerky. Nesco FD-75A food dehydrator just took 5 hours to dry 5 pounds of beef . One huge bummer of Nesco food dehydrator is the lack of a timer. However, you can get around this issue by buying an outlet timer. Some users have complained about high power consumption by FD-75A. I don’t think so, normally electronic appliances run by thermostats don’t run at peak power all the time. I have worked out the energy costs and it came about $1.82/month for 10 hrs a week running time.
Cleaning Nesco FD-75A is very easy. However, cleaning trays will take a little more effort. Things tend to stick on the mesh design of the drying trays, which makes it slightly difficult to clean up. The fan generates little noise. The instruction manual is slightly short on details, especially on how to dry various things.
Pros
- Number of trays can be expanded
- Fan on top for uniform drying
- Temperature control
- Easy storage
- Easy to use
Cons
- No timer. A serious disadvantage
- No ON or OFF switch. You will have to unplug to turn off or on the unit
- Trays are not totally dishwasher safe