Liquefying Large Volume of Honey

[IanB]

So, we are prepping for another batch, and I have been forced to liquefy 36 5 gallon pails of honey. They are frozen absolutely solid. What I have come up with as follows:

300 gallon HDPE tote
Large hole cut into the top
r13 insulation wrapped like a blanket around the tote to give good insulation
18 buckets of honey inside the tank
(2) 200 watt lightbulbs running on house socket plugs, plugged into an extension cord.

No idea if this will work, photo's posted tomorrow. What do you other commercial guys use to melt large volumes of honey?

Ian

 

[AToE]

If they're regular buckets you might be able to heat up just the outside layer, then flip it over and the whole block will slide out. If you can do that into some larger containers (before your fermenter, I think you'd mentioned yours only has a smaller hole?) then you could fill it with warm water and just use a good drill with a paint stirrer. Might even be able to tape down the trigger and go eat lunch or something...

That's a lot of crystalized honey man.

 

[wayneb]

Ian, as you know I'm not a commercial meadmaker, but I am an engineer, and I think that your solution might need a lot more light bulbs to work successfully. A 300 gallon container is approximately 40 cubic feet. That's approximately one tenth the volume of a typical small bedroom. That's a lot of volume to try to heat with only 200 watts (and that assumes all of the energy, both heat and light, coming from the bulbs gets converted to thermal energy in the container).

I can do a detailed thermal model of this system for you, but my intuition tells me that this won't work without lots more heat input. Even if you had the volume insulated well enough to raise the honey inside to its liquifaction temperature, the specific heat of the mass of honey is probably high enough that it would take weeks to reach that temperature.

The commercial honey supplier that I buy from uses a gas-fired oven that they designed, and although it heats several 55 gallon drums at one time (lots more volume than your arrangement), it also has a relatively hefty gas burner assembly that looks like it could heat an entire house. Even with that much heat input, and with significant solid insulation in the oven walls, it takes days to liquefy the contents of those drums since he doesn't want to overheat the honey in the process.

 

[tweak'e]

i'm not up on all the details as we havn't got ours up and running yet.

but commercially just use an insulated room and a small heater. a couple of lightbulbs is probably to much. i would recommend a thermostat to avoid burning it.
some setups use a drain, undo the bung on the drum and let it drain into a hopper as it heats up and then its pumped into tanks. having it drain away lessens the risk of burning it before the rest is melted.

the big thing is time. honey takes a long time to heat up. to much heat and it will burn the outside before the centre is liquid. small heat for a long time works a lot better.

i think we have an old hobbiest setup somewhere, its just an old chest freezer with a 100w light bulb.

 

[IanB]

Just an update

Ok, First off, thanks for the feedback. Here are a couple comments and answers.

1. After 24 hours, the tank had only moved 25 degree's up from ambient and the ambient temp is 42, so we only hit 60 degree's inside the tank. Now, I decided to drop in two more light bulbs to bring the temp up hopefully another 20 degree's, but I am anticipating this may also not be enough. Insulation is an incredibly powerful tool, and improving it on my tank will probably get me there with the (4) 200 watt bulbs in place.

2. wayneb, Heating a drum is really hard, and a boiler would almost certainly be needed. I have since added two additional 200 w lights, and we'll see if this hits the temp I need compared tot he surface area of the buckets.

3. We have 3 weeks to heat this honey. Thankfully I only have a few 5 gallons in the heater box at a time, so none are very close to the light bulbs and should prevent any burning until we get the right temp in the modified 300 gallon tote.

4. AToE, yes, we could dump the honey into the water, and then whip it with a 'blender/mixer' we actually have a 1000w drum mixer for this very purpose, however it is a HUGE risk that we not be able to mix the honey properly, and end up manually trying to recover from a failed design for mixing, adding a LARGE amount of time from the first mix of water and honey and the first pitch of yeast. However, if we don't get a good melt to our honey, this is the direction we will be taking no matter how much of a PITA it is. To add to the agitation solution, we do have a 1000w centrifugal pump, but the intlet is only 1/2 an inch, so I am worried dumping a huge tub of honey into the tote, and then clogging the centrifugal pump up, which would cause the pump to overheat if it is not being cooled by the must.

5. tweak'e The light bulb and the chest freezer is 100% the way to go, however, we can't get a chest freezer into the winery (out of space) and so we are trying to compensate by building our own insulated box (even though the insulated box is not as efficient as the chest freezer, it should still be efficient enough for the 40 pails we need to heat).

6. in the end, what might have worked best, is lowering the pails into our fermentation tank, then getting our chiller system to work with a portable water boiler. Then hooking up our chiller system to the boiler and running 100f degree water around the tank that would heat the inside of the tank to 100f, and just let it all liquify. Somehow this idea never occurred to me until now, but it is an expensive 200$+ solution. If the light bulbs work, I will be happy.

In all honesty, working with volume, and thermal heat transfer has been the most difficult part of 'making' large batches of honey wine. Either keeping the wine cool, or heating stuff up is just a PITA! This must be why most Meaderies still work on 55 gallon sized 'work' batches, and then blend the mead together, or just do 55 gallon sized batches, and then just bottle and make mead more often to keep up inventory. My .02 cents for others getting into commercial volume, thermal heat transfer (or cooling) could become your biggest technical challenge when creating your mead on a large scale.

 

[wayneb]

A question for you, Ian. Are you measuring the air temp of the chamber with or without the buckets added? Here's something to consider as you experiment further. The air temp inside a chamber filled with honey buckets will actually rise a little faster, and get to a slightly higher equilibrium temp, than if the chamber is heated empty. Air reflects the addition of heat energy as a change in physical temperature very readily, so if you're heating less air volume, it will warm up more quickly and it will go correspondingly higher in peak temperature. However, the transfer of that heat to the honey will take a lot longer than if the chamber had only a few buckets in it, since there is less air to act as the transfer medium and more honey mass to heat up. I'm glad you have weeks to get this accomplished!

Four light bulbs might be enough, but the increase in temperature will not be linear with the increased power added. Losses through the insulated walls will transfer correspondingly more heat as the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the chamber grows. The further increase in temperature within the chamber with 4 bulbs will likely be more moderate than the 25 degree shift you saw from the first two bulbs. What equilibrium temp are you trying to achieve?

Finally, if 4 bulbs don't make it, you might consider looking at tag sales in the neighborhood for one of those "solid state space heaters" which are much more efficient at transferring electric energy into thermal energy at the temperature you're trying to reach, and they generally run in the range of 1000 to 1500 watts - that would be slightly more thermal input than you have now. I've seen them for sale used, cheap, at lots of places (including thrift stores) this time of year as the weather starts to warm up.

 

[mmclean]

Here's a post from beesource.com forum:

I wrapped a waterbed heater around the 5 gal bucket, duct taped it so it wouldn't move, and wrapped it with aluminum faced bubble wrap insulation (reflectix). Set the heater to 100 and let it go. Two days later the entire bucket of honey is liquified. Very nice!!!

 

[AToE]

4. AToE, yes, we could dump the honey into the water, and then whip it with a 'blender/mixer' we actually have a 1000w drum mixer for this very purpose, however it is a HUGE risk that we not be able to mix the honey properly, and end up manually trying to recover from a failed design for mixing, adding a LARGE amount of time from the first mix of water and honey and the first pitch of yeast. However, if we don't get a good melt to our honey, this is the direction we will be taking no matter how much of a PITA it is. To add to the agitation solution, we do have a 1000w centrifugal pump, but the intlet is only 1/2 an inch, so I am worried dumping a huge tub of honey into the tote, and then clogging the centrifugal pump up, which would cause the pump to overheat if it is not being cooled by the must.

That's a good point, I guess if you sat there blending it for a few hours and it wasn't all mixed yet because of the 5 gallon blocks then that would be a bit of a problem for sure... I've done it before with 1 gallon blocks (I didn't try to mix it with the full volume of must, just about 1/3 full of warm/hot water) and it did eventually dissolve, but it took a good half hour of blending away at it. That way if it cooled down before it was mixed I could just add more heated water and keep blending.

Large time before pitch wouldn't worry me as much, obviously it's a huge investment of honey, but if contamination was a worry sulphiting it would take care of that.

Now that I picture actually sitting there all day mixing up a 1/3-1/2 must with all that honey I realize that would be a really laborious task. It would be better with some kind of automatic mixing device you could just leave on for 24 hours or so and come back to a nice mixed must.

 

[IanB]

You should know

We are getting liquified honey now. At least enough to poor into water and in some cases a REALLY NICE temperature honey that is fully liquid. I can do about 4 buckets in a 36 hour cycle, and might try adding more buckets, but it is just a pita to keep pulling the 60lbs of honey in and out of the tank and adjusting them.

Anyway, the light-bulb idea is working, and was much 'cheaper' than the space heater. Also, if a bulb breaks, it is only 3$ to replace. If a specific space heater breaks, it could be up near 50$ to replace. Also, the light bulb setup will break-down easy, and take up a very small amount of space.

For the money, and as long as you have the time. I think the light-bulb idea is a winner.

Ian

 

[mfalenski]

While not as big as you (Did you think anyone would say that to you??) we use an insulated box and belt heaters. They are variable intensity heaters, so putting it on a lower setting a few days / week before use has unfrozen honey for us. The day job is working at a brewery and we have steam fired boxes filled with water that were used in the past. We've also just run hot hot water over the bucket for 2-3 hours before blending it in.

 

[fatbloke]

Something has been ticking in the back of my mind since this thread was posted.

What is this actually about ? Getting the job done or what ?

Only because when there's a "water shortage" here (yes, it doesn't have to good weather for very long in some areas....) they ban hose pipe use in gardens etc, but they don't ban pressure/power/steam washers, as they use considerably less water.

So surely, if a power/pressure/steam washer type device was available, then placing the solidified honey in the fermenter and then hitting it with the washer would dissolve the honey ? i.e. the hygroscopic nature of honey would cause it to become viscous enough to use some sort of industrial quality mixer/blender. Yes, sure, I know that if heat/steam was used, there would be a slight loss of some of the aromatics in the area of the honey where the heat was greatest, but as the honey quantity and build up of the water element would cool rapidly, any such loss would be incidental/minimal.

Or what the hell, if the solidified honey was cut out of the buckets and chopped up some into the fermenter, that very hygroscopic property would help dissolve the honey if just cold/room temperature water was added in a relatively short time ? allowing for the must to be mixed with the above machinery, which would mix, as well as aerate the developing must a lot quicker than "the lightbulb technique" ???

This isn't meant to be any kind of answer, but some "what if's" and "maybe's", typed up.......

I've read Ian's blog, but don't have a mental picture of what facilities are available......

Good luck with how you get on though.....

regards

fatbloke

 

[tweak'e]

cutting honey out of buckets sounds a whole lot easier than it actually is.
if its softened up but not fully liquid then its not to bad to scrape out and mix into warm water. cold water is really difficult to get hard honey to dissolve and typically just ends up as sludge at the bottom when your dealing with large volumes.
melting the honey in the buckets first is a far easier way.

also i would not recommend useing extremly hot water (or steam) as that will cook some of the honey (and steam can react).

 

[Smarrikåka]

One way to do it is if you get lots of buckets that are wider than the 5 gallon ones with honey. Put the honey buckets inside the wider buckets, then fill the wider buckets with hot water.

You will need to change the water about once every 30 minutes as it will go cold, but this method should melt the honey relatively quickly.

 

[Tannin Boy]

One way to do it is if you get lots of buckets that are wider than the 5 gallon ones with honey. Put the honey buckets inside the wider buckets, then fill the wider buckets with hot water.

You will need to change the water about once every 30 minutes as it will go cold, but this method should melt the honey relatively quickly.

Agreed,

This would be the most efficient approach.
The volume of water surrounding your honey buckets
should have a large amount of water and a heat source below
to continue the process in a timely manner.


TB

 

[Smarrikåka]

Agreed,

This would be the most efficient approach.
The volume of water surrounding your honey buckets
should have a large amount of water and a heat source below
to continue the process in a timely manner.


TB

36 heat sources is probably a little costly. I think a little labour won't hurt here. But if you want to systamize it, I'd make a small hole in the bottom of each of the buckets that allows the water to run out of it at a slow rate, and then have a narrow hose going into each bucket filling it up at the same pace with hot water. The narrow hoses would all be connected to a wider one that is linked in to a waterheater.

 

[IanB]

Clarification

Ok, I think I will post one clarifying point.

1. This was a question to other commercial meaderies (if they wanted to respond) on how they liquefy their honey.


~Now, back to my specific circumstance where this thread has gone ~

First off, these are all great idea's, here is how they apply to my specific circumstance and the solution that is currently working for me.

I have since had good luck with the (4) 200 watt lightbulbs inside the 300 gallon insulated HDPE tank. Total cost was 20 $ for the whole system (not including the tank). I can melt 5 - 8 buckets in 36 hours. That is plenty fast for me, and nothing is burning at all, what's not to love?

One thing I do want to point out, is that cutting honey out of a 5 gallon is not that bad, if you only have to do it 1-5 times....doing it 36 times (remember the buckets weigh 60 lbs!) is a PITA. Not an option commercially (for me anyway).

Hot water is not an option for me right now (although could be for some people) and the setup was going to cost me about 200$ to get that up and running (if I did want to do some sort of hot-water option.

Steam is not an option (again large cost).

Right now, if you are a commercial meadery, and you need to heat 5 gallon pails (as opposed to 55 gallon containers) I think the light bulbs in some sort of insulated space is the solution. It's not for everyone, but it works for me.

 

[Noe Palacios]

Ok, I think I will post one clarifying point.

1. This was a question to other commercial meaderies (if they wanted to respond) on how they liquefy their honey.


~Now, back to my specific circumstance where this thread has gone ~

First off, these are all great idea's, here is how they apply to my specific circumstance and the solution that is currently working for me.

I have since had good luck with the (4) 200 watt lightbulbs inside the 300 gallon insulated HDPE tank. Total cost was 20 $ for the whole system (not including the tank). I can melt 5 - 8 buckets in 36 hours. That is plenty fast for me, and nothing is burning at all, what's not to love?

One thing I do want to point out, is that cutting honey out of a 5 gallon is not that bad, if you only have to do it 1-5 times....doing it 36 times (remember the buckets weigh 60 lbs!) is a PITA. Not an option commercially (for me anyway).

Hot water is not an option for me right now (although could be for some people) and the setup was going to cost me about 200$ to get that up and running (if I did want to do some sort of hot-water option.

Steam is not an option (again large cost).

Right now, if you are a commercial meadery, and you need to heat 5 gallon pails (as opposed to 55 gallon containers) I think the light bulbs in some sort of insulated space is the solution. It's not for everyone, but it works for me.

IanB: I don't have that problem, but I aqree with Wayne. Well, what could I do in your situation like your?

I choose this: go to Wal*Mart, buy an inflatable pool, place the tote inside the pool and fill the pool with hot water, and as soon as the water get cold (and it will happen faster than your air get hot) I replaced it with new hot water.

Regards.

 

[Noe Palacios]

IanB: I don't have that problem, but I aqree with Wayne. Well, what could I do in your situation like your?

I choose this: go to Wal*Mart, buy an inflatable pool, place the tote inside the pool and fill the pool with hot water, and as soon as the water get cold (and it will happen faster than your air get hot) I replaced it with new hot water.

Regards.

By the way, if you are running a commercial meadery, you chose the most expensive way to heat something --- radiation and air --- bad choice. Maybe is cheap when you buy your bulbs but you should notice how your electricity bills will rise and rise and take out all profit you could have.

 

[AToE]

I don't think a few bulbs running for a few days will really hurt the power bills much, maybe at worst $20 or $30 would be my guess with several bulbs running for at least a week.

I do like that kiddy pool of hot water though - but that too comes with bills, the gas bills to heat the water. I'm not sure if there's really a painless way to deal with this.

 

[wayneb]

If you happen to live in a part of the world with lots of free solar energy (anywhere around my place qualifies), you can build a simple hot box out of fairly cheap components. If a wooden box is insulated on 5 of 6 sides, painted with a flat black paint inside, and if the 6th side is also painted black but is made of a different material so it can transfer heat from the sun to the inside relatively easily (a metal plate works well), then you have a crude solar oven which can bring the temperature of anything inside that volume up to around 50-60C with almost no trouble at all, as long as the sun is shining on the metal plate side. In fact, the inside of the box may get too hot, if you don't have some way of venting some of that heat to the outside.