Fighting the heat

Experienced freeze dryer users know this well – dealing with cold is much easier than dealing with heat. In winter, the room can be heated to the required 15 °C using an additional heater, and AMARU then maintains the temperature on its own. But on hot summer days, it is not that simple. How can you help your freeze dryer survive tropical days and nights without unnecessarily shortening the lifespan of individual components?

Air conditioning

The most effective, and of course also the most expensive, solution is air conditioning. In most cases, a portable unit from a DIY store will probably not be enough, especially since it also needs a permanent outlet for hot air to the outside. A split air-conditioning unit with a cooling capacity of at least 2 kW is a better option – and we are still talking about just one AMARU freeze dryer. With more units, the heat output increases as well.

DEHEATER

Whether you have adequate ventilation or not, DEHEATER certainly does no harm. In winter, it can transfer the heat generated by the freeze dryer to another room, while in summer it can be used to remove waste heat outside the building. This means DEHEATER will not cool the room by itself, but it will at least help minimize the additional temperature increase caused by a running AMARU freeze dryer.

Fan

A fan on its own is more of an emergency solution. It works best in combination with air conditioning. Although it will not remove heat from the machine as effectively as DEHEATER, it will help move hot air away and bring slightly cooler air from another part of the room towards the cooling unit intake.

Ground floor or basement

As mentioned in the introduction, even a cold basement is easier to heat in winter than an attic room is to cool in summer. It is therefore worth thinking about operating conditions already when choosing where to place the freeze dryer. It may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many users do not have to deal with heat simply because they placed their AMARU in a ground-floor or basement room.

Let it cool down

When situations arise like this year, when Europe is hotter than North Africa, it is worth considering whether the machine really needs to run nonstop. Especially on weekends when the forecast predicts temperatures approaching 40 °C, it is worth asking whether a single weekend process might do more harm than good.

If there is no other option, the minimum you can do for the freeze dryer is to properly clean the cooling unit intake grille and check the distances from walls and other appliances. Higher temperatures reduce the efficiency of the cooling unit in the freeze dryer, so on hot days it may be necessary to add several extra hours to the process compared to the usual recipe that works during the rest of the year.

And do not forget that even the best ventilation will be useless if the cooling unit ventilation grille is clogged with dust. But we have already covered that in one of our previous articles.