Seal Problems with FoodSaver V2866

[Pedro Demetrio]

First i would like to say that english is not my primary language, so i apologise in advance for a lot of gramatical erros to come.

I was very excited when i came across this product in toutube and asked my sister in law, who lives in california to help me up and send some to me all the way to Brazil. After a lot of burocratic money transfers and a lot of waiting i got this by mail.

i went through 10 of the 25 bags i bought alredy and i cant get any bag to seal it properly. Thats very frustanting since its a very expencive product especialy for Brazilians standards.

What hapens is that the bag seals for a cople of days and them the seal just pry open… since the meat didnt stay bounded with the bag the meat just got a wierd texture and color, with dull taste.
not expoil thought. Just no flavor.

My vacum machine is brand new, so im wandering if there is some secret technic that i should know? It supose to lose the seal every cople days?

[Pedro Demetrio]

Just to add something .. I try to clean the bag with paper towel wherer the mouse vac goes. I try to seal one, two and three times. If i seal one or two times in the same spot, the seal wears off in a cople of days. If i seal three times the bag melt completely.
I also try to vacum + seal in the vac mouse them do a security seal where there is no vac mouse. And try to do one to three seals there too with the same results.

Im planing to cut a piece of the normal vacum bags and try to make a sleeve to seal the bag. Maybe that work. Becuse i have no probleme with normal vacum bags. Any ideas ll be more them welcome.

[Ron Pratt]

Pedro,
Welcome to the forum. I wish you would have written long before you wasted 10 of the 25 bags!
Based on what you have described I believe your FoodSaver is defective in that it is either not getting hot enough to melt the UMAi Bag or is too hot and is melting it! I do not mean that to be a smart aleck response!

You do NOT need a perfect vacuum with the UMAi Bag to achieve proper aging! As I have posted here repeatedly you don’t even need a Food Saver!! What you can do instead is to place the meat inside the bag, press the bag against the meat, and then gather the open end of the bag together and insert a flexible straw or piece of tubing into the gathered end, continue to squeeze out any captured air and then just suck any remaining air as best you can – then quickly yank out the tubing and seal the bag using a bread twisty (one of those paper or plastic covered pieces of wire – I assume those are used in your country – if not use a short piece of string tied tightly.

Ron

[Pedro Demetrio]

Thank you a lot. Ïll try that today. I can use the vacum to get it going no problem. The seal just come undone in a a day or two. I ll try to just do as i was doing but insted on trusting the seal just use a bread wire. But i ll try to cut i piece of the normal vacum bag and useas a sleve just to seal the ende of the umai bag. I got like 6 meats in process, i dont plan to give up on using the bags yet.

[Ron Pratt]

Pedro

Here is a trick I taught myself years ago trying to use a strip of FS bag to seal a UMAi Bag like you said you want to try. I did this before they invented the VacMouse strips.

Ron

[Pedro Demetrio]

Since my problem is not much with the vacum and more about the sealing iwas thinking about puting the FS bag sleev on the outside in the hope to get it to seal the umai bag inside of it.

But maybe i should take a diferent and simple aprouch. Maybe i should use onde of theses after i vacum to keep things going :

[Ron Pratt]

Those may work for you. Another trick I forgot to mention is after you insert the meat in the bag then slip that into a piece of “butcher’s netting” which you might be able to buy from your local butcher. The alternative to that netting is to use a piece of women’s panty hose! SERIOUSLY! The point is it compresses against the bag helping you drive out the air. Once you have the bag sealed remove the netting or panty hose.

One other thought Pedro if you insist on trying a piece of FS bag “your way” and NOT the way I demonstrated that works in that 5 minute video I posted then don’t trim down the bag to size and use that ONE bag time and time again as practice to get the hang of how the sealer will work for you. Ron

[Frank]

I’ve been having some problems with my Foodsaver. Sometimes, the bags do not seal completely, and they lose their vacuum, sometimes they won’t vacuum down at all. I was going through some stuff in the freezer, found another bag of meat with no vacuum.

After reading this review I’ve been buying the Walmart “Great Value” roll bags. They seem a little thinner than the name brand Foodsaver ones. Wonder if this is my whole problem? I just thought I’d ask the forum if anyone else uses them, and what luck they’ve had with them before I throw them out and buy some real Foodsaver ones.

Thanks,
Serhij

[Ron Pratt]

Just for clarification to any newbies reading this the question that Serhij has posed is NOT an alternate to using a UMAi Bag, but instead a bag used to protect food going into a freezer.
Ron

In the past I purchased an off brand roll material and never had an issue. However the supplier was a small mom & pop operation which went out of business.

Food Saver has that propriety style bag and it does seem to be overpriced. What I did was sign up at Food Saver and every once in a while they have close outs or simply great sales and I make a “large purchase”. As a for instance I use lots of the preformed bags so I bought 8 boxes of pint size and 4 boxes of quarts, and 6 rolls of the 11″. I forget the exact savings now but I do recall I saved 50% over retail store prices.
Ron

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