Indoor solar food dehydrator

Hi all,
I’d like to purchase an indoor solar dehydrator. The best one I’ve come across is the Excalibur … the description of it says digital but doesn’t have solar in the description. I want one with solar panels … it will be in our sunroom which has plenty of light but not necessarily plenty of warmth.
Does anyone have any suggestions of a reliable solar dehydrator?
I don’t have time right now to build one.
Thanks!

What you want does not exist. A dryer like the Excalibur will draw in the neighborhood of 1000 watts, which would require a solar PV panel of approximately 5'x10' in size to run the electricity. The solar panel would need to be outdoors and depending on cloud cover would put out less than that on average and would only work during the day. Or are you talking about using a solar thermal panel to generate heat passively which would then be piped indoors. I don't know of any serious solar food dryers that you can buy and use outdoors, much less for an indoor location.

The only way I could see it, is if you have a solar generator that you can plug the dehydrator into. But, yes - they're a serious draw on power, so it would need to be a really good generator.

I primarily use a box fan that blows through a screen over whatever I’m dehydrating. This is very effective and low wattage (less than 100 watts). I’m able to dry herbs like moringa, turmeric, or citrus peels in about 24 hours. Heat has not been necessary for dehydration. The air blowing over the herbs draws the water away.

I forgot to mention using the dryer that most Americans already own - the car. Park the car with the largest window facing the equator, roll down the windows about an inch, and put trays of food on the seats or dash, cover with a dark piece of cotton fabric (even a bandana will work). This fabric will keep direct light off the food to avoid blanching out vitamins and will help generate heat.  You just need to come up with trays, if not homemade then either repurposed from a commercial dryer, cookie sheets for really wet stuff, even cardboard or bamboo trays will work for leafy greens. Even if you have to buy a piece of fabric this is a pretty cheap and very workable dryer.  A greenhouse space will also work using this basic method.

In addition to a vehicle or greenhouse space, the other  very common suitable niche available to many people is the attic space of a house.  This is often both hot and dry, and simply setting up some screens and maybe a fan for air movement is all you need.  I have multiple years now used this niche to dry sliced tomatoes almost snap dry for long term storage, in the humid Midwest.

There aren't ones that are passive solar, from Excalibur at least. There is a French website that has some products that claim to be solar dehydrators for sale, but they aren't indoor and I don't know how well they work. There are also a PDF and video with plans and how to build one on that site too. Any passive solar dehydrator will most likely need to have at least some of it outside.

I doubt there's an electric one that comes with its own solar panels. Excalibur is A/C electric only, so for PV solar you'll need an inverter as well as the PV panel(s) to power it. Back in 2017 I got a 5-tray Excalibur electric dehydrator that only uses 440 Watts of power and used it in our solar powered RV travel trailer when we were full-timing it in the RV for several years. No longer full-timing it, but still use it. I'm not seeing it on their website, but there may be others that have lower wattage. I looked into all the models at the time to find one that uses full sized trays, but as little energy as possible. I believe there was a 4 tray model that used about half the power 200, 220, something like that, but it used smaller trays and I wanted to standard sized ones so passed on that. I did take a while deciding on that one though.