Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey built a warming cabinet that holds up to 50 honey supers at exactly 37°C, the maximum temperature before honey degrades. Pipe heaters, high-flow fans, and thick insulation keep the temperature uniform during 24-48 hour warming cycles before extraction and jarring.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and today I'm going to show you my super warming cabinet. Now, I built this cabinet about 6 to 9 months ago. I used to have a much smaller cabinet that I used to heat up supers and heat up buckets of honey. And a little bit about why I have to heat up the honey first, so When we extract the honey, we extract it into buckets and we leave the honey in buckets until it's ready to jar. Now, the honey sometimes sets in the bucket, sometimes it doesn't. If the honey sets in the bucket, we need to warm it back up to a certain temperature to get that honey to liquefy again. So we have a strict process in place for this. We never heat the honey up above the temperatures within the hive, so we take it up to 37°C. Now, all that does is it just gets it to a point where it's just liquid. And then that means that we can process it. So in order to do that on scale, we built this super warming cabinet. So I use that for many things. Well, I use that for 2 things really. One is warming supers, so I can get up to 50 supers at a time in there. So when I'm bringing the supers in here from the apiaries, I'll bring them in here, put them straight in the cabinet, put it to about 20-25 degrees just to keep them warm, keep the edge off them. Makes going through this machinery a lot easier if the supers are warm, and obviously you can't extract it out if it's, if it's cold at all. I do find it, it's kind of nice to have, like, this log cabin in the summer is a very warm place to be, so I don't have huge amount of issues of extracting. I tend to do all my extracting in the summer anyway, so I'm not there in the middle of December trying to kind of keep, keep hives and keep supers and frames warm. But the other one is that I heat the buckets of honey up in there as well, so I can stack buckets up and kind of turn it on for maybe 24 or 48 hours Come back and then the honey's liquid and I can put that into my creaming machine or put it into my settling tank. And then obviously they're connected with the ball valves and the connections to fit it up to the bottling machine, so then I can get it into the jar. The jarring machine, it's a requirement. The honey needs to be heated up to about 30-35 degrees in order for it to work. It doesn't dispense properly if it's not heated up to that correct level. It's all to do with the viscosity of the honey. So you're just following the guidelines and what the machine wants you to do. So in this video, I'm going to give you a quick look around the honey super room, tell you how I built it. It's, it's very, very simple how I built it, so this won't be a long video at all. Um, see what you think. So here we are inside the super warming cabinet. As you can see, I've got the thermostat on the wall set to 36 degrees. You can see the temperature at the moment is actually 7.4 degrees because this hasn't been on at the moment. I've run some wood along the bottom there just to give me a bit of an air gap between the heaters that sit underneath it. So if you kind of zoom in there, you can see I've got pipe heaters that sit underneath it. I've got one on that side and one on that side, and they're all connected up to this thermostat here. So I tell the thermostat what temperature I'm aiming for, and then that runs up to that sensor up there. So that sensor is reading the temperature kind of mid-height in the room, and then it delivers the heat through the heaters. I have fans here. So if I turn the fans on— Now the fans are capable of blowing a huge amount of air around that room. The design I've got here really wouldn't work without them. You'd have it— it'd be very hot at the bottom and not so hot at the top at all. So the fans are a really kind of critical element of this and crucial for moving that warm air around the room. So I've turned those fans off. So as you can see, it's, it's pretty rough and ready. It's lined with ply, but But I don't make any mess in here at all. As you can see at the back there, I've got black trays. So when I'm putting supers in here, I run all the black trays along the floor and then stack the supers up in the black trays just to stop any dips. You can see on the ceiling I've got Celotex, and in the walls there's 100mm of Celotex as well, all around, including underneath. It's a crucial one, is you need to make sure that the floor is insulated, um, and obviously the door is insulated as well. It's just a piece of Celotex, the door. So that's it for today's video. Um, I hope you understand a little bit about why we have to have a super warming cabinet. And if you want to have a go at building one yourself, I can send you a link to some of the controllers and the heaters that I use. So if you have any questions, just drop me a message. I hope you enjoyed the video. Please subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you again soon. Thanks, bye! Thanks, bye!
