Review on FoodSaver V4840 2-in-1 Vacuum Sealer Machine with Automatic Bag Detection and Starter Kit - Safety Certified - Silver - 18.80 x 9.50 x 10.60 inches by Jeremy Romero

We have been using this product for about a year now. We mainly vacuum pack meat for the freezer, but we sometimes pack and seal other products as well. The device is excellent at sucking air out of branded zip-lock bags with the help of an additional vacuum hose. This is ideal for storing cheese in the fridge. It also does a very good job of cleaning plastic containers that you can buy from FoodSaver. Overall we are very happy with this machine, but would like to point out a couple of rather minor flaws. First, it is sometimes difficult to insert the end of the vacuum bag into the sealing slot. The bags have to go in quite a ways and sometimes the bags seem to hang and need to be taken out and put back in several times before the machine will clamp the bag for vacuuming and sealing. Also, it appears that quite a bit of additional material is required to make the seal, which seems wasteful due to the expensive pouch material. Another problem that really becomes a problem sometimes is that you can't seal packages consistently. Let's say you have ten bags and you need to seal the bottoms of the bags so you can put food inside for vacuum packing. You must wait after each package has been sealed before sealing the next one. I didn't time the wait, but it's long enough to be frustrating and slow down the whole process. The same wait interval is required after each vacuum and seal cycle. When sealing multiple packages, the waiting time between operations becomes significant. Another problem is that in order to successfully vacuum pack the products in the bags you cut from the roll, you have to make sure you use a lot more bag material than you would expect. We find that we cut a much larger bag than seems necessary to ensure the bag is long enough to fit into the vacuum and seal machine. If the bag is not long enough for the machine's automatic sealing mechanism, you can start over and make a new, longer bag. It's just impossible to get a bag that's too short to work. We tried a few cheaper pouch rolls from another manufacturer to save some money considering how expensive FoodSaver brand pouches are. Most of the time bags from other brands worked well, but sometimes they didn't. For example, we recently wrapped chicken breasts individually. It was unavoidable that a drop of juice got inside the bag where the bag was to be sealed. This apparently resulted in all four bags not being properly vacuumed. I'm not sure if the bags are properly sealed as I didn't want to squeeze the chicken juice bag to check for leaks. The bottom line is that these packages and/or the machine are out of service. Finally, I would like to point out that this machine does its main job of vacuuming products in bags as advertised. So far the machine has been reliable and hasn't let the job down. The addition of an extra vacuum hose is a great feature and worth a small fraction of the extra cost in my opinion, although you do need to be aware that you will need appropriate accessories to use with the vacuum hose, such as a vacuum hose. B. FoodSaver brand ziplock bags. .