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I have some more tips on vacuum packing that I'm excited about. We bought a VS-280 vacuum sealer from Sorbent Systems. This is not an ad for them; I have no association from them other than having ordered from them twice now. This vacuum sealer is also available from quite a few other places. What is cool about it is that you can vacuum Mylar bags or other non-channel bags. It has a nozzle that penetrates the bag opening during vacuuming and retracts during heat sealing. This means it doesn't need the special bags that Seal-A-Meal or Food Saver type sealers require. This sealer is about 100 dollars. There doesn't seem to be a mid-grade or budget high-grade sealer in this category. The next lowest-price nozzle vacuum sealer seems to be in the 2000 dollar range. Bags for this sealer cost about 10 cents or so each instead of 40 cents or so. The down-side is that it is trickier to use. My wife threw her arms up in frustration with it but I was able to use it without any trouble after a few failed attempts. Besides the savings, which may or may not be worth the extra effort, I like it mostly because I can vacuum seal Mylar bags. This gives me a stronger storage container with better barrier specifications and light blocking as well. Another new tool that we bought for vacuum packing is an 18-inch table top impulse sealer. This is the type about 100 dollars - not the really fancy ones. It is amazingly fast. It seals the Food Saver bags as well as the Mylar bags - but no vacuum. What I used it for today was to quickly turn a bunch of over-sized 8" x 16" Mylar bags at 35 cents each into two perfectly sized 4" x 16" bags for spaghetti at about 18 cents each. These bags are heavy enough that we didn't have to use the spaghetti boots that I described using with the Food Saver bags in another thread. This sealer is great because it has an effective 100% duty cycle - at least for us. We can seal as fast as we can prepare bags to onto the sealer. Your mileage may vary :). Using the specialized sealer for bag making/resizing work saves the duty-cycle-limited vacuum sealers for doing vacuum work. This greatly increased our production rate when sealing rice and pastas. I think that the rice and pastas packed this way with a thrown in 100cc oxygen absorber will last for the rest of our lifetimes.