Lyson Uncapping Machine Review – Faster Honey Processing and Cleaner Cappings

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We're in the honey extraction room today and we're in a very, very full honey extraction room today, so I've got about 50 or 60 brood boxes worth of honey to extract, so it's going to take me a while. In this video though, I'm going to show you the Abello uncapping machine, so So I'm going to do various videos covering all of the machinery within my Abello-sponsored extraction room. Today I'm not going to be doing a full run using the sump. I'm just going to basically fill up this container here. This is the 100-liter premium settling tank and then call it a day. So the fact that I've got my sieve on here, I'm not going to run it through the sump. So in this video though, we're going to review and have a look at the Abello uncapping machine. So this machine takes all of the cappings off your combs and then pushes it down into the wax cappings press underneath. So this video is going to be a bit difficult, it's very, very cramped in my honey extraction room, so I'll do my very best to kind of give you kind of up-close images of the machinery that I'm using. But in this video, we're going to focus specifically on the Abello uncapping machine. I've gone for the heated Closed water circuit machine. So basically you fill this little tap up here— I'll do a couple of close-ups— up to the level that's on the other side, and then it pumps heated water through serrated knives, which you can set and adjust at different depths, and then that cuts all of the wax cappings off your frames, and then they drop down into the wax cappings press, which we'll cover in a separate video. Right, so let's get to it then. Obviously, whenever you're doing any honey extraction work, cleanliness and hygiene is paramount. So we'll put our hairnet on, we'll put our gloves on. Obviously, you've done a full clean, make sure everything's clean before you start. Make sure that your honey's ripe. If you want to do refractometer testing on it, you need to make sure it's ripe as well. So let's get on with it. So again, apologies, it's really, really difficult and cramped in my honey room to show you this. So first off, you've got your power box here. You just want to turn that from 0 to 1. That turns the power on. And then you've got your digital controller here. I'll do a close-up again, but you've got your heat settings for the knives. You need to get this up and running kind of 10 or 15 minutes before you want to start extracting to get that temperature up. I use about 65°C. That's the temperature that I've been advised to use for the knives. That doesn't mean you're heating your honey up to 65°C. That's just the temperature of the knife. And then that means that you get a really nice clean cut, and then all of that wax cappings goes down into the wax cappings press. You have a function here, so you can say whether you want it to go to the left or to the right, and then you just have a start and a stop button. Like all Abello equipment, license equipment, it's really nice, user-friendly, simple equipment. So that's it, it's on now. The chain's moving round. I'll just show you a couple of dummy frames. All you do is you put the frame in like that, turn it to the left. When the frame comes to the notch, it will set itself in and then it will pull itself down through. So there you go, you can see that now, that's pulling itself down through into where the serrated knives are moving. It hits the channel. The chain pulls it down, and then obviously if that was a comb, it would cut off all of the nice wax cappings, drop them down into the capping screw press. Then it pushes it along and waits for the next comb. So you can do kind of 3 or 4 of these at a go, but it sometimes jams a bit. So I find 2 is probably the absolute max you want to really be doing. It saves any kind of unnecessary drips as well. But obviously just with foundation, while I'm showing you it, it will just But I find, yeah, try and keep it to kind of 1 or 2 cones at a time, and then you'll never ever get a jam. And as you can see, it's taken that one in there along now. It pushes it through, and then it comes out the other side. And then what I really, really like about this machine, something that's really good, is that it actually pushes all of the frames along. Like, it will push 20 extracted frames along just through the use of the machine. I thought I was going to have to kind of manually move them at this end of the machine, But it doesn't work like that. It does just move them along for you. So as you can see, I mean, this is the 3rd one going through there now. It gets to the bottom, all of that wax cappings will be extracted, and then it just pushes it all along ready to go. So we just stop that for a sec and let the knives heat up, and I'll just show you a couple of close-ups of the heating function, how you turn the machine on, and how you get the chains moving. So here we are looking at the settings here. You've got the heat setting. So when you wanna turn the heating on, you press the button there and you can see that has turned the heating on now. So we're starting off at kind of 25.6°C and we're aiming for about 65°C. When you hit that button, you can hear the water start pumping around the system. You need to make sure that there's always sufficient water in that system. There's a gauge on the other side that makes it really, really easy for you to do that. But don't run the system dry. And then obviously you've got your plus and minus here. So if you want to turn that temperature up to say 70 degrees, you can do that quite easily. Like I said though, 65 degrees is where I like to be on that. I find that's perfect, a good kind of compromise between too hot and effective on the machine. So if you want to turn the heating off, press that again, and that's the heating off. Obviously we're trying to get that heating up now, so Let that one go up to about 65 degrees, and then we'll show you some going through the machine. So this button here just turns the knives on. So you'll see in the bottom left-hand corner, the knives go. Now turn those off. And then on the side of the machine here, this is where the chains are. So in the center is off. You can turn it to the right, which is reverse, or you can turn it to the left, which is put combs into the machine. That only works once you press this button here. So you come back around, turn the knives on, and then you'll see the chains work as well. Now you can just see up there, see the chains moving around. And that's the machine now in full operation. During— that is exactly all you need to do to get it into operation. You use this button here to get the temperature to where you want it to be, this button here to turn the knives on or off, and then this little switch around here to kind of determine the direction of the chain. Which, like I say, left is basically on and right is reverse. Right, so the machine is now up to temperature. I'm going to take some frames, run it through, do a couple of close-ups, and show you how effective the machine is at uncapping wax frames. So not all these frames are perfectly capped. We've done tests on them though, and they are kind of a suitable level in terms of water and moisture content. I still run them through here though because it saves me uncapping them. Again, if you were in a nice bigger extraction room, you definitely wouldn't have this set up against a wall. You'd have easy access to it that side. I'm massively hampered by space in this room. I've got far too much equipment in a much too small a space, so everything is a little bit awkward. This would be much better in a nice big open extraction room. Don't forget, always wear hairnets when you're dealing with honey. Gloves are best practice as well. So let's turn it on. We've got the heating on up to the level we want. Turn the knives on and then press this machine to the left. That starts driving it through. And that's it, it's as simple as that. I've done 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10— 10 frames there. I mean, so probably a standard size super or brood box, taking me a couple of minutes. The biggest benefit though, yeah, that I have with this machine, and you probably see me there, is that I can just leave— I can leave it to it. I save all of the time because all I need to do is just kind of plonk some frames in here and keep it fed, and I can go away and do other stuff. I can go and check for other supers, I can tidy up. Obviously, when I start extracting, I can go and extract, I can empty buckets, I can fill buckets. It frees up my hands and me to go and do other stuff. So I love this machine, and I know I probably say it about every single piece of machinery I have, But this is the game changer in my extraction room. This is the one that saved me the most time, and this is the one that enabled me to kind of like process a lot more honey than I previously did. So I love this machine. So we'll do a few more videos of it. I want to do a close-up video showing the wax cappings coming off, and I'll show you a video from the other side as well, just so you can see how it pushes them across and how the table works. Right, so I'll just run another box through it now, showing you what happens at this end, and you'll be able to to see kind of how much space you've got on this tray here on the table and how it pushes them along. You can see how the frames just get constantly pushed along. There's plenty of strength in there for them to push them all along at once. Obviously I'd be starting to take those out Now and put those into the extractor. So it doesn't really ever build up that much anyway. This is purely for demonstration purposes. Any of this stuff, just pick it up and just pop it down the hole there. That's feeding back into the wax capping screw press. And then all of the honey that's dripping down there, I just get a scraper and I push that back down into the wax capping screw press. So it's a really, really efficient way to extract honey. It keeps— let's get the honey off there— It keeps all of the honey exactly where you want it, and it gives Gives you an outlook for it, do you know what I mean? So it comes down here all the way through, drops the honey down, the honey filters down into the wax capping screw press, it goes through the screw press, which we'll do in another video, and then it comes out as ready, ready filtered honey. Obviously we filter it again just to make sure there's absolutely no kind of wax or anything in it, um, that it comes out relatively clean. And then we just take these frames and put them in the extractor and we extract our honey out. So that's what we're going to do today. So that's it in terms of the review for the machine. This is a fantastic machine, really, really good. Obviously you can buy it from Abello. Um, I don't know what I'd do without this machine. It saves me so much time. And I think when you make that jump up and you've got kind of like 100 colonies, you really, really do need an efficient way to uncap, or it just ends up sapping too much of your time. And I think this machine really, really kind of fits the bill in terms of an efficient uncapping machine. So they're not cheap, um, they're about £3,500 to £4,000 just for the uncapping machine. And then the wax capping screw press is a very worthwhile addition, and again, that's another £3,500. So I paid about £7,000 for all of that setup there, for the wax capping screw press and the uncapping machine. But it saves me a lot of time, and obviously I can claim the VAT back and I can offset it against my business costs as well. So that's it for the review. I hope you've enjoyed it. I'm going to crack on now and get all of this honey extracted, get it through the wax uncapping machine, through the extractor, into the settling tank with sieve, and then I'll jar it all up ready to be sold on our website. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. If there's something we can do to improve the videos for you, please let us know and we'll try and take that on board. So thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.