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When the vacuum is on, the air is drawn out through the loose fitting lid. When the air comes back into the chamber,, the air pressure forces the lid on tight. The ring is tightened to maintain the seal. There is a little bit of a experimenting to determine how much to loosen the ring without being too loose. However I have found a about a quarter turn from fully tight is more than enough to ensure the air can get out and then have the lid reseat. In what way would doing this be any more dangerous than what can be done with a foodsaver adapter?

Kerry, Attached is a pic of what I am talking about. Tighten the rings down and them back off about a quarder of a turn.I run the vacuum cycle for 30 seconds on my machine. Pint size jars I can actually stand up in the vacmaster. You could do something simliar with the HR itself. Just put the jars in the chamber and manually operate the vscuum pump The only thing is to be real sure the jars have no cracks. I had a cracked jar that had a "blow in" and got glass all over the food inside . II had to throw that whole jar away.

Hi Kerry, I am not sure what you mean by short form? I notice people mentioning using foodsavers. I would highly recommend getting a chamber style vacuum sealer if the budget permits. The bags being much much cheaper compared to foodsaver style bags. The chamber in my model is big enough that I can put mason jars with lids in on their sides and vacuum seal them that way. Other models also have a nitrogen purge feature, so you can backfill with nitrogen gas for items that would be crushed by the bag in full vacuum. The model I use is a Vacmaster B210. I have had it for about 2 years and have used the heck out of it. I use it so I can cook in large batches. I can pretty much do most of my cooking on the weekends. Just to stay on the topic of the freeze dryer, one thing I will add for people who might contemplate getting one, is the machine puts out a lot of heat. Of course you are running freezer, vacuum pump and heaters all at the same time. I have been limited to running my machine on the weekends when I am home all day and I run the AC. With temperatures about to start to cooling down, I will be running my machine more frequently

Greeting all. I saw the thread about the freeze dryer and decided I would sign up to comment. I have had one for about two months now and have really been wanting to share experiences with others who have used the unit. I wish Harvest Right would set up their own user forum already! Primarliy at this point I have stuck with basic fruits. Apples, banannas, strawberries, blue berries. All come out great. The only limitation I have really found is with the ice capacity of the machine. It seems to be able to extract about 3 pounds of water before defrosting. is need. Otherwise the time to finish goes way up. I have some ideas on how to maybe increase that with some theirmal shielding, but have not tried yet. I will share one thing that did not go well with freeze draying. That is orange juice concentrate. It has some much sugar in it, that even at -50F, I ended up with a messy explosion of freeze dried OJ. I did let the process complete and the freeze dreid OJ concentrate reconstiuted just fine. I was just a really messy clean up. I probably will not try it again. An interesting comment on the hot dogs not freeze drying well. That was one of the things I was planning to try in the near future. I will still try it and also see how well it holds up under vacuum sealing. Looking forward to hearing from the other HR users.