How to easily decrystallize honey 30 kg buckets on small scale

Most Honey types crystallize over time and there is nothing bad about that, its just a natural thing to happen and there is nothing wrong with crystallized honey at all.

While some people seem to prefer crystallized honey it can become a bit unhandy for the beekeeper when it comes to bottling honey jars.

In our case we still store a lot of honey in 20 or 30 liter buckets, that's 8 gallons for people using imperial systems. We tend to first store it on those buckets prior either selling the buckets bulk or filling it into smaller jars for retail sales purposes. However filling of smaller jars can happen up to a few month later, hence the buckets can become crystallized by the time we intend to jar them.

Sous-Vide-Machine

 

When looking around for a simple solution to warm up the honey, to get it back into a viscous enough state to fill into jars we checked for something simple to use, low maintenance, zero effort requirement, and trying to be energy efficient.

That's when my brother Gordon was preparing some steaks using a Sous-Vide machine, when we found it to be also very handy to keep a large enough tub at perfect temperature to warm up our 30kg buckets full of honey. Same, same, but different.

As it turns out we can place 2x 30kg tubs into the black tub, heating up the water to approx 38 degrees Celsius and letting the buckets sit there for around 24h. Once done we can insert the next 2 buckets while the water still remains warm and keeps the heat for another few rounds of buckets.

  

Depending on how well insulated this is being setup, I could imagine it being fairly economical in terms of energy consumption. You also may change the heat source from electricity to gas.

The fact that we can easily just pop in 2x new buckets while the water is already pre-heated makes it fairly efficient, also if the heat source switches off for some reason then the heat does not just instantly dissipate.

Below you can see the Sous Vide machine dialled in for 25 hours at 38 Celsius.

Recent updates to above have been:

Mosquito mesh to the sous-vide machine to avoid "stuff" from getting into it:

Long term operation:

Water evaporation causing the sous-vide machine to stop operating is a bit of an issue with the above system, however there is a easy fix, just add a large container of water on a stand next to it and insert a float valve into the water tub providing the heated water. This will keep the water level constantly at the point where the sous-vide machine can continue operating.
We added a bit of insulation and built a custom lid to retain the temperature and improve energy conservation. 

In 24 - 48 hours you are good to go to bottle approx 50-60 kg.

Stainless steel float valve found on eBay or Amazon:

Using the alternative wife's car de-crystallization method:

Your alternative may also be to use your partner's car to de-crystalize honey in the warmer month of the year, however I can assure you heaps of trouble....
Experience is always the hardest lesson to learn, hence make sure you clad out the area with baking paper or similar, or you'll end up with a bit of trouble as there's always that odd drip of honey and honey and hot cars is not much fun.

A recent car dash de-crystalization fail:

it only takes a short time until your honey jar gets all wobbly, so a word of caution when attempting to use the windshield method!! And this was during the Australian spring / September leading into October time frame.

 

Toolbox / solar heating:

This is same similar as the above, with exception of not using your wife's car for as a solar heater. The same style heater can be used to render bees wax also. In Perth Australia you would have to watch not to excessively heat the honey as it can become fairly hot and honey should not be exposed to over 38C to avoid cooking off the goodness within over extended period of time. Once found again, we will link the study about temperatures and duration and damage done of excessively heating honey too much here.

CONTHERM digital series oven

DingDong Fabian from Suncity honey showed us his funky oven, which seems to do the job quite nicely and in a very short amount of time. This seems like an easy "no fuss" solution which fits 2x buckets at any given time.

Happy honey bottling!

Please let us know if this information had been useful on your journey to your first set of bee hives!

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Happy beekeeping,

The QuickWings Team

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