schmellba99 said:

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B-1 83 said:

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I've had a Food Saver "Game Saver Plus" for nearly 10 years. Keep it clean, clean the seals, replace the seals when needed, it's just fine.

I use the "Out of Air" bags these days

Edit - not sure how I got that emoticon

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Mine is going on 20 years now. I've replaced the seals maybe 2x. It just keeps working.

I"m sure the chamber sealers are nice, but they take up a lot of counter space compared to a Food Saver style. If you are using it quite a bit, I am sure the chamber sealers make it worth while. But for your run of the mill use, the food saver is just fine. For me anyway. And I usually seal about 150-200 lbs of sausage every year along with a bunch of ground venison in 1lb bags on top of the normal stuff like buying steaks and sealing them individually, etc.

I even seal quart bags of stock with mine without any issue. Took a little finagling to figure it out but have been doing it for probably 10 years now.

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Same - 10+ years with the Game Saver. In addition to all the usual stuff like meat and fish, I like to make a huge pot of pinto beans and seal up dinner-sized portions that I can pull out, warm up in a pot of boiling water, then serve or smash for refrieds.

Texaspainter said:

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I bought a LEM a couple years ago to replace my cheap Food Saver. It may be the bags I have but for some reason the LEM will not reliably make a good seal. Very frustrating and I find myself pulling out the old Food Saver most of the time now because it is much more reliable on sealing the bags. For this reason I recommend staying away from the LEM sealers.

I'm seriously thinking about biting the bullet and moving to a VacMaster chamber sealer. It would be nice to be able to seal liquids and such. I wanted one when I got the LEM but I just couldn't make myself spend the extra dough. Wish I would have now. OP, if you could up your budget to about $900 you could get a nice VacMaster....

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This. The wife got me a Lem 500 for xmas several years ago, don't know why as we had the Cabelas. Bu it was light and handy to use whn steaks and chops were on sale. Worked nicely, although I didn't really Like the locking system. Put it up one day after sealing some steaks, when I got it out next, would not come on. Absolutely nothing. So I called customer service, they said it was probably a bad board, charged me 30 bucks for a new one. Put it in, And yes, it came on now, but it would not cycle to the seal function. Just sat there running forever. Got tired of messing with it and put it up. Finally a while back I decided to mess with it again. Ordered another board, put it in, and it started working correctly, but the seal was hit or miss. sometimes a good seal, more often than not, not sealed well. Would stay far away from Lem.