In this video Laurence Edwards gives a comprehensive, first‑person walkthrough of his compact honey extraction room, detailing each of the ten pieces of equipment he uses, their specifications, operation, and his personal assessment. He starts with a Lyson Classic Line automatic 24‑frame radial honey extractor, noting its stainless‑steel construction, swing‑cage basket, automatic control unit, and the trade‑off between the standard and premium lines. He then explains the Meliflow wax and honey melter, its temperature controls, dual use as an uncapping tray, and cleaning considerations. Two bottling machines (classic silicone‑impeller and premium gear‑module) are reviewed, with production figures of about 4,500 jars in six hours and a preference for the premium model due to better viscosity handling. The Lyson heather loosener is described for extracting heather honey, followed by a 200‑liter insulated premium‑line creamer with a large motor and Mitsubishi controller, used for soft‑set honey. A conical‑bottom settling tank with a 400‑micron sieve is highlighted for final filtration. The automatic wax‑frame uncapper and downstream wax cappings press are praised for speed and heat‑free honey recovery. A honey pump is mentioned as spare equipment. Finally, Edwards maps the flow of supers, frames, wax cappings, and honey through the room, emphasizing short, efficient movements and minimal handling. He invites viewer feedback on the setup and suggests a previous video for a before‑and‑after comparison.
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In this video, I'm going to give you a detailed look around my honey extraction room and show you all the equipment that I use to extract my honey. Right, let's jump straight into it then. There are 10 pieces of honey extraction equipment in a very small honey extraction room. First up, how could this not be first up? My honey extractor. No honey room is complete without a honey extractor. This one here is made by Lyson. I paid for all of this equipment myself, and I can really give it a top quality review. Lyson do make very nice equipment. This honey extractor though is a Classic Line automatic 24-frame radial extractor with the ability to do a 6-swing cage basket as well. So everything's made out of really good quality stainless steel, got rubber feet to stop it bouncing around on the floor. That works really well. And then inside you can see we've got swing cage basket function. Around the outside, you've also got the ability to put your frames in there, so you've got a 24-frame capacity. Really good quality, nice thick stainless steel on the bars. Good quality control unit as well, fully automatic. You can just press it, program it, and it will do a full cycle for you. Spins both ways. It really is a top-quality extractor. I have to say, I wish I'd gone for the premium line for the one simple reason is that it's a little bit heavier, which stops it bouncing around. But also, I like the ability to not have any of the motor or the control box on the top. Some of the models have a Perspex sheet here and another Perspex sheet here, and it's completely flush. I don't like all of these bits on the top. Makes it a bit more difficult to clean because you can only access it from one side, but it also means I can't have a shelf above it there. So would I recommend this piece of equipment? Definitely yes, because the premium line's about £1,500 more. If I was going to buy it again, I would go with the premium line just for those 2 simple upgrades. Right, next piece of equipment in no particular order, my Meliflow. So this is a wax and honey melter. I've also got a wax capping screw press here. We get through a lot of wax cappings that have honey in them, so in order to get that honey out, we need to melt it all down. We siphon off the honey, and then that honey becomes baker's honey. So everything that goes through the Meliflow doesn't end up in the jars. We actually use that to make our hot fire honey. But the Meliflow is a really simple piece of It's due a little bit of a clean, so obviously this gets cleaned at the end of every season. It's got a stainless steel mesh at the bottom, and all you do is you just chuck all of your wax cappings in there, you melt it up, and it goes out of that outlet at the bottom. It's got a handy little bar that goes across here, which means that you can rest your frames here, let all the honey drip out, so you can use it as an uncapping tray as well. Got a controller on the side there that goes up to about 75°C, and then it's got a controller on the top as well that goes up to 120°C. And that helps you really get that wax melted very, very quick. But you do need to be careful with that because it can catch a little bit. We tend to run that at about 70°C as well. Leave it overnight and everything's melted. Right, next 2 bits of kit here, very, very similar. We've got 2 bottling machines. We've got the classic bottling machine with a silicone impeller dispenser, and then we've got the premium line bottling machine with a gear module dispenser. Both of those are running with a stainless steel turntable And I definitely wouldn't buy these without a stainless steel turntable. Would I recommend these products? 100%. These are by far and away the best products that we have in this room. They save me so much time. Me and my nephew, we do the honey extraction and the jarring in here. We set both of these up and we do about 4,500 jars in around 6 hours using both of these machines. If I had to pick which one was best, definitely the premium line. And I'm not just saying that because it costs quite a lot more. This model here is slightly more temperamental, just in terms of a little bit of leakage between jars when you get the viscosity of the honey wrong. You can work your way around it, you can make sure you get the viscosity right, but this one here manages that viscosity so much better and you don't get that dripping between the jars. This is probably my best buy in the room, highly recommended. Right, next piece of equipment is my Lyson heather loosener. I've done a separate video on this one, I've done separate videos on a few of these actually, but this is such a good piece of kit. You can't extract heather honey in an extractor without some form of loosener like this. It's a pain to clean, and again, this one here needs a good deep clean before it's used again, but it's such a simple design. You can see down there, you've got the needles, they squeeze in, loosen that honey to mean that you can tangentially extract heather honey. But I definitely have a little bit of a stainless steel fetish. Look at the design of that. That really is a beautiful design. Design, and I'm very happy with how the Lysen one works. Right, next up, Premium Line 200-liter insulated creamer from Lysen. Oh my God, check out the size of that motor! It is an absolute monster. What I do with this one is I keep it sealed at all times. You can see it's got honey in it at the moment. It's about half full with honey, and it makes the creamiest, smooth soft-set honey you can imagine. All of my tanks have one of these valves attached. That's really important 'cause it means that you can connect everything up to your bottling machines. And this creamer weighs a lot when you put it together. As you can see though, really big motor unit there connected into the drive unit, and then a very reliable, good Mitsubishi-made Lyson automatic controller. The controllers on all of this kit really are top quality, really simple to use, and never fail. And then also on this unit, you've got a heating controller as well. So you can bring the temperature of that honey up if you need to, to reset that crystal structure before you add in your seed honey if you're using the dice method. Would I recommend the 200-liter Premium Creamer? Without a shadow of a doubt. It's a real workhorse and it makes making soft-set honey so easy. Next one along, and you can see how close it is here. Everything's really crammed up next to each other 'cause I'm so tight for space in here, but this settling tank is just superb. You've got a conical bottom which makes it so easy to get every single last drop of honey out. Nice stainless steel lid on the top that fits really well. And then for me, the most important part of this settling tank is the sieve. A big wide sieve means that when you're jarring any honey, it goes through there. It's your last line of defense before it goes into the jar. It's about a 400 micron size, so you're not taking out unnecessary bits, but you're removing any of the legs or larger bits of wax that you've missed. This here is how I filter my heather honey now. I pour it in here, it sits at the top, I agitate it, and then it goes down underneath and it gets everything I need to out of that heather honey. Looking in the tank though, hopefully you can see that you get the conical bottom so you don't have honey sitting below the level of the tap. Every last drop goes down, which means it's really easy to get every last drop out, really easy to clean. So then we move on to the expensive kit, and again, these are due a little bit of a clean. They've had the once-over, but they'll get a deep professional clean before they're used again. My automatic wax frame uncapper— this is the best machine in the world. It really does save you so much time. But essentially, you have a reservoir of water up here connected by tubes. You have oscillating blades that are connected into this heated water supply, so the blades get really warm, which means they absolutely fly through the frames. And then you've got the hopper up here, is just where you pop your wax frames and then they feed down. Highly recommend this unit. The only downside is that it's not completely chain-driven, so you do need to load the frame, say, 2 or 3 at a time, as opposed to putting in a box of 10 at a time. But at my level, that's no problem whatsoever. What's really nice about this unit as well is how well it works with the wax cappings press below. So the frames come down And then they get pushed automatically along here. So you can rack up about 30 frames up here. All of the honey drips down onto this tray, and then it feeds back down over there into the wax cappings press below. So here we are onto the wax cappings press. It recovers a huge amount of recoverable honey without adding any heat. That's why I like it so much. I don't want my honey to drop into a heated tray, and then I'm heating it up, and then I'm putting it in jars. I like to not add any heat to my honey, and the wax cappings press does that really well. So the frames go in at the top, the uncapped frames end up over there, all of the wax cappings go into that hopper there, and then they go along the Edison screw press, and out of the end comes wax cappings that are really compressed and dry. And then down at the bottom, it all filters through, and then you get unfiltered honey coming out of the bottom. Which goes into the settling tank and comes out at the end of the day as good filtered honey. My final piece of equipment is down here, which is my honey pump. We don't use that at the moment, so it's just stowed nicely underneath the honey extractor there. Didn't want to sell that one though, because that's the one I think if we move forward with our plans, I'm probably going to need that at some point. So I didn't want to sell it, but we don't really use that that much. It just lives in here and it doesn't take up too much space. So there you go, that's all of my honey extraction equipment. But don't go anywhere yet because I'm going to show you how that honey flows around the room. So I bring my supers into the room through this door, and they're stacked up along there behind the camera and up to here because the creamer's not in action. And get about 50 supers in here, quite a bit of space to move around. I then pick up the frames of honey from over here, and they get put into the frame machine here, the wax uncapping machine. See that movement? Really easy. The frames go down, the wax cappings go off down into the wax cappings press, and then the frames move along over there for further processing. At the bottom of the wax cappings press, I get my compressed wax cappings that go over to the Meller Flow, and I fill that up probably 3 or 4 times a day, so it's not a repeated movement. And then all of the reclaimed honey that needs further filtering gets taken as a bucket from there and put over here. You can see all of those movements from here to here with the frames and from here to here with the buckets are really short movements, makes the flow work well. So then the next part of the process is over here with the uncapped frames. The machine pushes them along all the way till they're over here. Then all I need to do is pick up a frame, put it into the heather press if I'm doing heather honey, and then I can open my extractor lid, lift it out, and put it straight in there. If I'm not doing heather honey, I can just lift it straight from there into there. Really simple, no movement whatsoever. All I then have to do is collect the honey from the extractor into this bucket, and I take it back over there into a single settling tank. And once the settling tank is full, I decant that filtered honey into clean buckets and I go and store it off in another room immediately just to keep the space clean. So what do you think about that? Do you like my honey extraction room? Do you like the equipment that I've got? Do you think my honey process is smooth and efficient? If it's not, definitely stick the comments below. If you think I can do anything better, there's a better piece of machinery or a better way for that honey to move around my room, let me know. I'm always up for small iterative improvements. If you want to see what my honey room used to look like, hit that video there and you will see a massive change from before.
