Last week it began raining Apricots at my home and I had procrastinated buying a dehydrator to deal with this year's bumper crop of fruits. I had done my research though, and was considering a 1000-Watt Nesco American Harvest FD-1010 or Nesco American Harvest FD-1020. Instead, in all of San Diego CA the only high-end dehydrator available was the L'Equip 528, at the Great News store in Pacific Beach. So I purchased it, quite reasonably at $125 + tax.
The L'Equip 528 is a 550-Watt system that comes with a 12 year warranty, six 1.2 square foot trays and an excellent user guide. It can be expanded to 20 trays by purchasing two-tray sets at $20 each. The thermostat control is labeled in degrees Fahrenheit (instead of low-med-high) so that you can get the right heat when needed for specialty fruits. So far I have dried 2 batches of apricots and another 2 batches of peaches. My experience is that it will dry 6 lbs of fruit (using six trays at 140 deg-F) in 12 hours, yielding 1 lb of excellent quality dried fruit. The trays need to be rotated about every two hours.
In comparison to the Nesco 1000-Watt products, I would expect the Nesco units to dry food in less time. The digital timer on the Nesco 1020 model looks interesting but some users report you need to rotate trays every few hours when drying significant quantities of foods. In terms of cost the units are essentially the same per square foot of drying space. The long warranty on the L'Equip is a plus. I still plan on buying a Nesco unit for next years crop -- it will be dueling dehydrators!
Those of you who do a lot of food preservation might find this gold-mine of information interesting:
Food Preservation - Utah State University