The oven manufacturer (whirlpool) has just replied after I emailed them They said that the temperature dial in all their fan assisted ovens refers to the temperature of the air inside the oven, not the food. Which sort of makes sense since ovens are designed to be operated with the closed door. So my guess is this information would probably apply to other oven manufacturers too!

Which means that when used as a dehydrator, with the open door, because of the dehydration process the temperature of the food will be lower than 122. How much lower? Accoding to excalibur themselves, its 20 degrees! This is the article: [www.excaliburdehydrator.com] So if the air temperature in the oven is 122, the dehydrated food should not get hotter than 105. Which is perfect temperature so far as lots of recepies that I've seen call for.


Seems good solution if you have family members that use oven (so you have to have one in the house); if you don't plan to do dehydration at 95 degrees (it seems the lowest the oven usually gets is 122); and finally if you dont plan frequent and extended dehydrations (on the Excalibur website they say an oven uses more electricity than the dehydrator - could be true but worth checking with your particular oven make, who knows maybe not!) Note that this applies *only* to fan assisted ovens, because they have the necessary air flow for dehydration, and also because of this uniform temperature throughout (no hot spots).

>Banana ice-cream rocks!<



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2012 08:54AM by chat.

the lowest temp setting I can get on either my toaster oven or my oven (Kitchenaid) is 170. If I try to enter a lower temp setting, I get an error message.

Yep I suppose not all ovens go as low as 120F, ours does though, it's a relatively common Whirlpool (common in UK).

>Banana ice-cream rocks!<