gearing up for another season.
you can see the markings on the floor from the old one.
at least this one is built by pro's and not home made.
the old hot room as been relocated and turned into a mechanics room.
new hot room
- Thread starter tristan
- Start date
gearing up for another season.
you can see the markings on the floor from the old one.
at least this one is built by pro's and not home made.
the old hot room as been relocated and turned into a mechanics room.
the big thing is being able to have honey in there long enough to fully heat up. the last one we emptied it in a day.
thats the extraction room. the gear is not installed at the mo as i ground off the floor and re-epoxied it.
theres not enough space in the extraction room to do a hot room entrance into it. the extraction room is only two bays and most of the gear fits in half the width. its fairly compact.
next job is to go reinstall the heater.
it has a big air handler and duct work to flow hot air through from one end to the other.
the big downside is its not very hot and it doesn't blow down into the boxes.
as its heating through the boxes, it needs to sit for a long time to heat up. hence the big space required so it can hold 2-3 days worth at a time.
should be. its a massive heater (after all it was made on the mainland
). the big problem has always been time.some crowds put fans directly above the boxes to blow down through the boxes. unfortunately we do not have that.
Some time ago one of the Berry boys wrote a good article about hot rooms and heat capacity and energy transfer etc. It was in a nz beekeeper mag which I read quite a few years ago and may have been published some time before I read it. Not sure if it was Peter or John berry.
Honey shed layout is one of those things one never quite gets right .....but with time the Feng Shui works itself out and the flow of goods eases, making for a seemless day where boxes move from hot room to uncapper to extractor and out to storage in an easy rythmm.
It is also good to have heaps of space for slaves to move around the machines and pallets of boxes coming and going.
Our extraction plant has sort of got there, but could still be a bit bigger.
Boxes arrive from the field and are trolley jacked into the hot room through a sliding door. They exit through another sliding door straight to the uncapper and extractors.
Combs come out of extractors onto a sorting table and are replaced into either brood or honey boxes and stacked on pallets - 36 boxes to a pallet. They then exit the extracting room through another sliding door to box storage.
The hot room is heated by a large electric heater that blows hot air directly to the ground. At the other end of the room is a fan in large pipe that moves the hot air from the top of the room to the bottom. A thermostat halfway up the wall regulates the temp at 35c.
It is always an issue trying to heat the very bottom boxes on the harvest pallets, and in retrospect, some form of under floor heating would have been nice ...... water pipe from a boiler heated by an overshot wheel in the creek beside the shed ......
I always had a thought to make the whole operation hydro powered .....
Next time !
It is also good to have heaps of space for slaves to move around the machines and pallets of boxes coming and going.
Our extraction plant has sort of got there, but could still be a bit bigger.
Boxes arrive from the field and are trolley jacked into the hot room through a sliding door. They exit through another sliding door straight to the uncapper and extractors.
Combs come out of extractors onto a sorting table and are replaced into either brood or honey boxes and stacked on pallets - 36 boxes to a pallet. They then exit the extracting room through another sliding door to box storage.
The hot room is heated by a large electric heater that blows hot air directly to the ground. At the other end of the room is a fan in large pipe that moves the hot air from the top of the room to the bottom. A thermostat halfway up the wall regulates the temp at 35c.
It is always an issue trying to heat the very bottom boxes on the harvest pallets, and in retrospect, some form of under floor heating would have been nice ...... water pipe from a boiler heated by an overshot wheel in the creek beside the shed ......
I always had a thought to make the whole operation hydro powered .....
Next time !
It wasn't me and I would be surprised if it was Peter. Not really our area of expertise. I have always been a fan of eight frame Tangential extractors and they really didn't need a hot room unless it was really cold.
Couldn't agree more. We don't use our hot room and honey temperature never exceeds 30 C while passing through extractor, spinfloat and dehydrator.
Yes, ours definitely could be bigger, but it's working as it is and we got used to it. We have 2 warming rooms, both with underfloor electric heating, it's great. While we empty one room the other lot is warming up, we keep them at 27 C, which gets all our honey out nicely.
I had a search across the NZ Bkpr magazines, but didn't spot anything. Actually, I'm a bit surprised that there aren't any really complete and useful articles about hot rooms. Often mentioned as part of the overall process, but I just thought I might be able to find something that at least gave a framework for temperatures, air flow, time, etc. The sort of thing Andrew Matheson or Cliff Van Eaton - maybe Murray Reid - would have written...
one of the issues that started arising is a lot of this sort of technical information is being lost, as its not written done. beeks are having to reinvent the wheel from generation to generation.
i don't see the point of trying to process it at low temps when they are melting the honey out of the drums etc later on.
i need a minimum of about 34c to get honey to flow well enough so that spinfloats work properly as most of the honey we deal with is that sticky.
heating it in the hot room saves it being heated in the extraction plant, plus it makes it easier to get more out. also means the extractor pumps don't get bogged down. if its not heated well in the hot room it can pump so slowly it back logs the extraction room.
it doesn't matter that its not perfect because next year its modified again.
every season something is being changed. its constant evolution.
Couldn't agree more. We always had to heat our honey we just didn't do it before we extracted it because we didn't need to. If I was still doing my own extraction I would still do it without heating, not because I'm worried about warming the honey but because I still use wood and wax frames and I find they survive extracting better when they aren't too warm.Having said all that if I was taking off honey late in the year and it was cold I would warm it up before extraction.