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Sunday, September 9, 2007

A Clean Honey Room

A clean honey room is not only essential, but difficult. Honey is sticky and messy. One drop can be tracked all through the room. Honey is hard to clean up. Hot water is essential! Once we got our equipment up and running, we began working on our room. Since the building was already build, I simply had to add insulation, wiring and plumbing. Okay I went a little further and added high speed Internet and satellite TV. Once the insulation, wiring and most of the plumbing was complete I began hanging the dry wall. Hanging is the easy part. Mudding, taping, sanding, mudding, taping, sanding...that's the tedious and hard part for me.

The main part of my honey room measures 12' x 14' but it also has a 4' x 5' section where one door takes you to our honey display room, and the other door takes you to our hive manufacturing area. But, you'd be surprise how little space is need to house a lot of honey processing equipment. I contacted our state health department and obtained their guidelines in what they want to see in a honey room.


I purchased a high powered 6' fluorescent fixture and also bought the plastic bulb covers. This is more than enough light for the room.



Next it was time to add the honey pump and the 1 1/2" pvc to carry the honey.


First, I had to rebuild the pump. It mean taking the pump apart several times, cleaning it, replacing O rings and making sure it worked. Roper, the manufacturer of the pump, has an excellent support staff that helped me configure my pump for my operation. My pump is a Roper 2835P. The P stands for packing. I also bought new packing for the pump. The pump is powered by a pulley from a 3/4 horse motor. This motor was in good shape, though I had to re-wire it to reverse the motor rotation.
Once the pump was ready, we simply started plumbing the pipe from the catch tank beneath our uncapper up to our 500 gallon storage tank. As you can see in the pictures, the line is angled so that we don't waste honey sitting in the line. Sometimes, we need every drop. So, by sloping the line, we can easily drain the honey from the lines and wash the lines out if needed.



We added clean-outs to drain and clean the lines.