Abelo Smoker Box Review

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to review the Abello smoker box. So we'll just get the smoker out of the way to start off this video. I'm doing another video on this at the moment, how to get super long burn times out of your smokers. This is up to 3 hours long already, so if you've seen this video and you want to see how it's at, at 3 hours long, this is how long the smoker goes on for. So in this video, I'm going to review the Abello Smoker Box. Now, this is such a good piece of kit. It's a really, really simple design, but it's something that I literally couldn't do without within my beekeeping because it means that I can transport my long-burning smoker. You see, the smoker goes for 3 or 4 hours. I can transfer it between apiaries, and I don't need to set it up and start it again at each respective apiary. So I can Start it off in the morning, go around all of my apiaries. Once I've finished, I pop it back into this box in the car and I can safely transport it from apiary to apiary. So it's a really simple design. It is a galvanised steel box with a hinge that just opens and closes like that. It's got fireproof seals all the way around the sides here, so it effectively is a closed container. And what I do find is that the smoker does need a bit of puffing once it comes out of a long journey in here. Because it's been starved of oxygen. It's a completely sealed box. It's got folded edges, so it's no sharp edges at all. It's got a nice little tie there that holds it into place. Not super tight. There's probably a few little air gaps there. Now, obviously, it's not going to work perfectly. So if you've got, I don't know, BMW X5 or something fancy like that, and you've not got a pickup truck that looks an absolute mess, you might not want to be putting something like this in here because you will get a little bit of smell. Still coming out of the box. But what this does is it provides a really safe solution for moving it around. It's stable, it's not going to tip over, but most importantly, it's secure and you're not going to have a fire in your car. Now you can see my box is really, really well used. I've had this for about 2 years and it's absolutely rock solid. There's nothing that can really go wrong with it. It's, it's a simple galvanised box that's been folded together and riveted down the edges, so there's no welds or anything. Nothing really that can go wrong with it. I'm just going to show you how effective it is at stopping smoke coming out of it. So what I do with mine is I take this and I leave this. This just lives in the back of my pickup truck. I clamp it between the back seat and the front seat, and then it literally lives like that. So all I do is I open the roof like that, pop the smoker in, and then I close it back up again. So if you want to know what's keeping this smoker going for long, and this is about 3 hours now and it's giving proper good smoke coming off it, And it's not horrible, acrid smoke either. I'll put the video up there, take a look. It's a really good video, really good tip to keep your smoker going for 3 or 4 hours at a time. So this smoker that I've got here is a really cheap smoker from Old Castle Farm Hives. It is basically broken. I've only just realised this is broken, so I've ordered a new one. I've got a Rouchboy smoker coming from Becky Bees, and I've got a Dadant smoker coming from Modern Beekeeping. So keep an eye out for them. They're 2 really high-end premium smokers, going to be a lot better than this one. I think this one's broken and it's probably going to be the last time that I light it. Nonetheless, the reason that I show you this one is that it's the exact same dimensions as a large Dadant smoker. So it's a really important note with this one that this box is huge and it will safely contain one of any of the smokers that are on the market all the way up to the large Dadant. And as you can see, that has just failed on me now. So the rivets have gone, I can no longer use this smoker, which is a little bit upsetting. As you can see, this is a really well-lit smoker. I'm not cheating here, it's a well-lit smoker with lots of smoke. If you put this into your car, it will be full up of smoke within a few minutes. So I'm going to take this smoker now and I'm going to pop it into here. As you can see, fits really, really well, and you can imagine what that would be like if you just took that back into your car. So if you didn't have this smoker box, You'd have to empty out all of your fuel, make sure it was nice and safe so you're not causing any fires, and then start it up again at the next apiary. With the Abello smoker box, you just close it. So once you've done the latch up and you've made it tight and got that tight seal all the way around, as you can see, no smoke comes out of this whatsoever. It does fully extinguish the smoker that's in there, cuts off all oxygen to it whatsoever. So if you're doing like, I don't know, a half an hour, 45-minute journey, You might just wanna leave that a crack open just to get some airflow in there. It will fill your car with smoke, but it depends what your truck's like. If you're in an old truck and you don't mind it being a little bit smoky, but you wanna keep it going from apiary to apiary, then leave it a little bit open. But I think it really is good at extinguishing all that smoke down. And then what I find, if you're just going on a 15 or 20-minute journey, that smoker will come back to life as soon as you open that box. My version here, I've got a few dents and dings all along it, so it does let a little bit of smoke out. I don't mind though with a pickup truck. It's a functional vehicle, so it doesn't bother me if it smells a little bit of smoke. I still would say though, even if you're taking this and putting it into a nice car, don't think that this is going to completely eliminate the smell of smoke. You can just see a few wisps of it coming out there. Even a couple of wisps of smoke coming out will make your car smell of smoke. So don't really want to be using this into any of any nice vehicles that you've got because it will make them smell of smoke. The main feature of this box is the safety aspect. It's putting everything inside a sealed metal box, which means that you're not gonna get any embers lighting your car and setting your vehicle on fire. So if we open the box back up now, you'll see the smoker is still well and truly alight in there. Take it out, broken smoker, give it the puff, and it's still going really well. It does knock it back a little bit, so you do need to give it a good few puffs just to get it back going again, and then you can carry on using your smoker. It's really, really good. So that's it for the review of the Abello Metal Smoker Box. You can get this direct from Abello, ranges for kind of just around £50. Very, very highly recommended by me. I wouldn't be without this. I just don't know how I coped without this because it allows me to use a smoker like that one there that I can Get it going for 3 or 4 hours. It's always there whenever I need it, whenever I've got a grumpy colony, and just keep that smoker ongoing the whole time, as opposed to getting to a new apiary, having to kind of put it all back together again, get the smoker going. That's what takes the time. And then putting it out at the end, trying to extinguish it so I don't set forests on fire. It's just a bit of a nightmare managing it that way. So the Abelos smoker box eliminates all of that and completely streamlines the smoker process for me. So if you're interested in getting this smoker, you can get it direct from www.abello.co.uk. I paid for this myself full price, but I would highly recommend it. It's a really, really good product. So as always, thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.