I love my dehydrator. It lets me take advantage of specials on fruit (apples during harvest season, etc.) and to dehydrate produce from the garden (peppers, onions, tomatoes, carrots, beans, etc.) as well as mushrooms (love it for dehydrating mushrooms). The advantage of dehydrating food is that the dehydrated food takes less space to store. The disadvantage is that it does use electricity so that cost has to be factored in to dehydrating. The dehydrator is one of the four "appliances" I think is well worth the investment. The other three are a bread machine (I use mine almost daily--I haven't bought bread, bagels, pitas, etc. for ages), freezer (I write on mine with a grease pen to keep track of what is in it), and a juicer (lets me juice veggies and toss the juice in the freezer for the winter, the pulp goes into soups and veggie stock). The other thing I keep in the freezer is lemon and lime zest and juice (I zest the limes and lemons, freeze the zest, juice the lemon and limes and freeze the juice in ice cube trays).
Yes, it takes time to prepare food from scratch, but I processed 100 plum tomatoes in my dehydrator last summer (I'd been away taking care of my mother who suffers from dementia and came home to 100 plum tomatoes). It took my brother and I 20 minutes to get the tomatoes ready and then the dehydrator did the rest of the work. I just had to check it periodically to flip the slices, take out those that were ready, etc. While the dehydrator was doing its job, I was able to sit at my desk and do my job.
Those dehydrated tomatoes come in really handy. And, the dehydrator is easy to use and doesn't take up a lot of space. I use mine about 2-3 times/week during the harvest season; 1-2 a month the rest of the year.
K.
