In this instructional vlog, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through the series of mistakes he made when first outfitting his honey extraction room and explains which of those issues he was able to correct and which are permanent constraints. He begins by listing nine major errors: lack of honey‑flow planning, choosing a log‑cabin structure, under‑estimating space needs, using inappropriate wall, floor and ceiling finishes, insufficient power capacity, poor access/egress for supers, and inadequate service planning. He then details the aspects he cannot change— the log‑cabin building, its dimensions, and the existing power cable route. Next, he describes the concrete improvements he has implemented for the room’s second version: covering all walls and ceiling with food‑grade plastic, installing a durable, waterproof Karndean luxury‑vinyl floor over a reinforced plywood sub‑floor, removing a home‑built honey‑warming unit and relocating it off‑site, building a freestanding, plastic‑clad platform to house the Meliflow and free up floor space, upgrading to bright LED strip lighting, and streamlining equipment to only the essentials. Throughout, he reflects on how better planning, material choices, and space‑saving strategies have transformed the cramped, problematic space into a functional, hygienic, and more efficient extraction area. He concludes by promising future videos that will showcase the remaining equipment, the refined honey‑flow process, and further tips for small‑scale commercial beekeepers.
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Today I'm going to tell you about all the mistakes I made when I first kitted out my honey extraction room, tell you about the mistakes I've been able to fix, and tell you about the mistakes that there's no chance I can possibly fix. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. You will notice we are in the honey extraction room and it's looking very, very different to how it used to look. So in this video, I am doing a version 2 of how I've refit out my honey extraction room. I'm going to talk to you about why I've refit the honey extraction room, the mistakes I've made from when I first kitted it out, how I fixed those mistakes, and the really annoying part is the mistakes that I just cannot fix. Right, let's dive straight into it then. What were the mistakes I made when I first kitted out my honey extraction room? Mistake number 1: I didn't plan my honey extraction flow. I just built a room, made sure it was health and safety compliant with the food hygiene people, got a 5-star health and safety rating, put all of my honey extraction equipment in it, and then realized I had no idea how the honey was going to flow from the supers through to the buckets. That was a terrible mistake, and a lot of the problems stemmed from not analyzing that honey flow. Second mistake was I decided to do it in a log cabin. Just the worst mistake in the world. Really wish I hadn't done that. It's weak, it's echoey, and it's difficult to fit out. Next mistake is the size. This log cabin is 2.5 meters by 5 meters, and when I first got in here, I thought this is going to be absolutely loads of space, definitely not going to need to expand. And within 2 weeks of putting my honey extraction equipment in here and trying to do some extraction, I realized it was horribly too small, really way too small. I wish it was 4 or 5 times bigger. It's tiny. We've outgrown it already, but we've just got nowhere to move. Next mistake was wall coverings, floor coverings, and ceiling coverings. Now I took advice from our local council here and said, what do I need to do? They said as long as the floor is moppable and you can clean that floor, then the ceiling and the vertical surfaces aren't so much of an issue. So originally, and you'll see from these pictures here, I had wooden walls, I had open ceilings, and on the floor I put some cheap lino. I thought that was going to work really, really well. All of those were terrible, terrible mistakes. I didn't research them at all. I didn't look into good products for ceilings, walls, and floors, and that was something that's definitely come back to bite me. The next big mistake is I didn't properly plan my services. So I managed to get clean water into the building. As you can see, I've got a sink there. But in terms of power, massively underestimated the amount of power that I would need. I looked at the maximum ratings of the equipment that I had, but I didn't work out how much I was going to use simultaneously. That's where the problem comes in. I'm limited now by the size of that cable that's coming into this log cabin, and I can only use select piece of equipment at the same time. Luckily, when I'm doing my honey extraction, there's no issue. But if, for say, I want to run the Meliflow and my big creamer and have the heating on both of them, it trips the cable, trips the power in that box over there, and I can't run both at once. Needs a little bit more planning. The next problem was access and egress. Getting all of the honey supers in here was such a big problem. I used to do it by hand, did it by hand for a couple of years, and just hadn't thought that through, hadn't worked out the amount of honey that I'd actually be lifting and taking out what the walkways would be kind of outside the log cabin but all the way to the truck as well. It's a mistake I made, and that's definitely one of the ones I'm struggling to fix. So I think that's about it. Like, that's probably nearly 10 big mistakes. I made so many mistakes when I first did this. My nature is just to rush into things. I'm a project manager by trade. I should be planning these things a lot better, but I just get too excited. I'm okay at it at work. I'm not so good at it when it comes to my own business because I just get too excited with things. So I've rolled this back, I've taken my time, and I've tried to plan things a little bit better this time. What I'm going to talk about now is what I've done differently in the refurbishment of my Honey Room Mark 2. Some things I fixed, some things I can't fix. So I'm going to run through the things first that I haven't been able to fix. Obviously, I can't fix the fact that it's a log cabin. We're stuck with that. I can't fix the size of the log cabin. I'm not going to go out and do any extensions. I can't fix the fact that the cable's the wrong side without going and digging up all of the ground. Just can't do any of those things. However, there's a number of things that I can fix, so I'm going to go into a little bit more detail in terms of these changes that I've made now, the improvements that I've made to my honey room, learning from that experience of about 3 years of honey extracting in this room with all of the pitfalls that it's got. So the first one, even though the health and safety team came and looked and said, you know what, it's good to get plastic on the walls, but you don't need to do it. It's not going to impact your 5-star hygiene rating. That's something that I've just gone and done off my own back. I've put plastic on the ceiling, I've put plastic on the walls. I have covered every single surface in this room with plastic. It's going to make it so much easier for me to wipe things down. Also means it's a lot lighter in here as well, so it's really, really nice. That is a big, massive improvement. And probably the number one driver for the change. The second change that I've made, and I wish I'd listened to people on this, and this one is the biggest gamble of this honey extraction room because I'm not entirely sure how it's going to work, and that is the floor. So I ripped out the lino because the lino was shocking. I put it down, so it wasn't even done properly, but the lino was just coming up all over the place. Anytime I moved equipment, moved machinery, it it got ripped, and then those rips were incredibly difficult to clean. So I said, as soon as I ripped it a couple of times, I thought, that is it, this is going. I cannot cope, just cannot cope with it ripping anymore. I'm putting down a whole new floor. So the floor is pretty much bombproof. I'm hoping that it's going to be able to cope with honey extraction equipment. It's Karndean, so it's a luxury vinyl flooring, supposed to be completely waterproof. We've laid down a Solid layer of ply underneath it, drilled it down every 4 inches, filled those holes, sanded it back, and then put the adhesive down and glued that floor down. Looking at it now, it looks so, so good. But the lino kind of looked okay. I'm still thinking maybe I should have gone for some outro flooring, but at the end of the day, it's a log cabin. I think from what I've seen from this carndean, it's going to be able to cope with what I'm going to throw at it. Right, the next one, and I know I included this on the things that I couldn't change, and I kind of forgot this one really. The big driver for me making all of these changes— obviously I wanted to get the plastic on the walls, but I had a big honey warming unit where I used to heat up my honey in order to filter it, heat up my honey in order to make creamed honey. Really, really good, solid, very adjustable thermostat built-in heater. So you take your honey up to like 38, 40 degrees just to get it running. You can put it through the filters. Used to work very, very well until one day when I put some honey in it, came back and realized that 2 of the buckets had gone. There was no honey in the buckets, and I thought, I definitely put full buckets of honey in here. Where has that honey gone? And there must have been like a microscopic crack in the bottom of the buckets, and they had just emptied all over the floor. So it was ruined. It completely ruined everything, all the electrics, all the machinery. So I had to get it all out. And it was at that point I thought, you know what, this is going to give me so much more space in this honey extraction room. I'm going to take away that home-built unit. I'm going to buy some specialist units from Abello that I will do a separate review on. I'm so excited about those. They are coming very, very soon. And I'm going to keep them somewhere else, not in the honey extraction room. But relatively close by. So the size element—sorry, I went off on a little bit of a tangent there. The size element—I've probably gained about 20% floor space in this room. That's a massive amount of floor space for me. And what I'm going to do—you won't be able to see it because it's behind the camera now. I'm still waiting on the joiner to come back and finish a few things. I need some trims around the wall. There's quite a lot of silicone to be done. Silicone a little bit on the corners, some trims, bit of tidying up. You can see there need a few cuts on the window bits. But also what he's going to do is he's going to build me a. freestanding cover for my Meliflow. Sounds like a really odd thing. Originally I thought I was gonna get the Meliflow, lift it up on some chains, lift the lid up so I could use it. But 2 of the things that take up a huge amount of space on the floor of my honey room are my 2 Abello Lyson bottling machines. So he's gonna build me a freestanding unit that's clad in plastic, but I can put my Meliflow in. That's gonna give me the ability to lift both of those bottling units off the floor Store them on this freestanding unit, effectively doubling up the space and halving that floor footprint. When you're working in a small space, you need to think smart when it comes to floor space because you rapidly run out. As soon as you start bringing 50 or 100 supers in here, you're kind of cramped and there's nowhere you can move. You really do need to whittle it down to the absolute bare minimum. That's going to be another video as well. I've sold off loads of my honey extraction equipment and I've kept The bare minimum, the stuff that I need to operate on a day-to-day basis. So although I can't adjust or amend the dimensions of the log cabin, I can really impact the way that I use that space inside, and I've opened it up just to give me the maximum amount of space. One thing that I got right first off was this lighting. This lighting is really, really good. Good quality, clear LED strip lighting brightens everything up, makes it a nice place to work, makes it really easy to identify where the dirt is, Makes it easy to kind of be in here, but also to clean things as well. So there we go. That's about it. Hopefully you've got a nice little glimpse of what my honey extraction room is looking like now. Of course, I will follow this video back up once I've got all of my machinery back in here, and I'll talk to you about the machinery that I'm keeping, what I've whittled it down to, and I'll talk to you about that flow of honey through the honey extraction room, which is important in a commercial premises, but even more important in a kind of semi-commercial small premises where space. So I hope you enjoyed that video. If you've got any questions about honey extraction equipment or the rooms, drop a comment below. You know I like to get back to the comments. Definitely enjoy talking about honey extraction rooms as well. What's really good about this is that now this room is fit for purpose. It's not ripped up, it's not cramped. I can get in here more and I can do more honey extraction videos. So 2022, you'll see all of my equipment up close and personal. I'll show you how we manage our honey in the honey room. So thanks for watching. As always, please hit the subscribe button. 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