Big fan of Altons, but this one missed the mark IMO....I have used this method 4-5 times to make jerky and the results are ok. Alot of maintenance is involved, each time I have tried changing it up to make it work better but never really got there....I dont see any reason why this would not work with peppers, but i would not based on my experiance. There are some small cons that Alton fails to mention
Pulling jerky...(or peppers) off of filter some of the filter fibers are stuck to the jerky
ALOT longer than traditional drying methods--3-4 days or longer depending on outside temps
Drying is inconsistant (ones closeset to fan blade dry faster than ones on outer filter so every day or so you will need to rotate, front to back)
I'm sure this one is my fault but:
Call me crazy, but I try to get the most bang for my buck so I filled filters completly full, end to end. When I did this the center seemed to get dry but the ones around the edge not so much so there was some rotating of jerky peices involved
Probably wont have this problem with peppers but when i did jerky, placing the wet jerky in the filter just saturated the filter and it became kinda weak when stood upright, the filter would not keep its shape under the weight of the meat, and i had to set the fan on its back between two saw horses.
Last winter, I tried this one final time, my mother in law had a dehydrator that quit working, she was gonna throw out the trays and I thought hey I could use those. So I loaded them up with stawberries and bananas and hooked them up to the fan. I had this in my garage, according to Alton cold is what we want. Probably around 45 degrees in my garage during dehydrating. Took about a week and a half and they never really got dried, more like fruit rollup consistancy. Bananas were on verge of rotting, or looking very unhappy, and getting them unstuck from the dehydrator trays was a chore, the results were not good at all and I threw out everything
My Final Conclusion:
If you are only doing small quantiies and all product is placed near the center of the fan only, and not using more than just a couple filters than this will probably work ok
Temprature needs to be at least 70 degrees
Filters are not reuseable and are not as cheap as you would think....My wife finally bought me a dehydrator this year for my birthday.
If it were me I would search craigslist for a used dehydrator or use BSPH method listed above, Altons method seems great on TV and it does work (in a pinch), but man the patience and effort involved is a real pain.
