Who left the tap / honey gate open? - Haven't we all been there? Is there a potential solution?

Most beekeepers will experience this at some stage we're pretty sure off.


Honey spills.... overflowing buckets... and having left the tap open!

Who has not left the honey gate / tap open and walked away in distraction. Quickly picking up the phone call while the honey is steadily filling that bucket in the background.
Then you get called to a different room / location for a "quick job" which ends up in another tasks or simply you forgot what you were doing..

And there you have it. Honey spills are costly and a pain to clean up, but honestly, have we not all been there?

So, while playing around with a water leakage sensor / tea bucket water alarm we noticed that the alarm went off pretty reliable when we stuck it into our honey bucket for testing purposes and made us think of a simple solution to avoid honey spills in future.

Our creativity and fantasy could easily imagine that someone on the internet may build a custom stainless-steel version of this to make beekeepers life an easier one.

It seems to work, still needs a bit of testing in "real" life with filling buckets, however when I stuck it into my honey/tea bucket it seemed to alarm fairly consistent.

Who knows, when there will be a food-grade commercial solution around this?

It be handy to have for sure!

Meanwhile we had tested this unit here, picked up from Jaycar:

Smart Wi-Fi Water Sensor - Smart Life Compatible | Jaycar Electronics

Feel free to play around with this topic and sensors and send us your pictures and creative solutions around the topic of honey spills.

 

 

A few days later...

A few days later we found "fish tank water level alarms" on ebay and gave it a shot.
And to our surprise the fish tank alarms seemed to be doing a better job than the above sensor when developing "multi-sensor head" setups. Meaning one can use one of those alarms with multiple stainless-steel forks which could be connected in parallel into honey buckets, meaning multiple could buckets could be monitored in parallel.

 

When playing around with the idea we first tried stainless steel rods, however noticed that 316 stainless steel wires could also be used and inserted way easier into buckets by drilling just 2 minor holes. Combining this idea with having multiple sensors in parallel this could develop into an interesting setup.


A further few days later....

Keep in mind, this is work in progress, and most cool gadgets have started in a garage using sticky tape to hold it all together at first...
Sticky tape can hold stuff together for a long long time! The problem usually starts when the sticky tape solution ends up being the long term solution, so lets try to avoid that. In the meantime, enjoy the next step / evolution of this idea:

We "proudly" present to you:     The bucket mate - by quickwings pty ltd :)

Having packed the electronics into a high end box, and it even features an on/off switch!

Both versions will end up with 2x sensors each inside the box, to allow for a bit of redundancy if one of the two fails and you start to rely on this magic little helper.

The initial stages of the bucket mate.

The build includes:

Pair of bullet connectors, electrical connector, 1.6mm stainless steel wire which hits the honey to keep  things food grade. PVC conduit, a bucket lid, and a 100mm end piece glued on the top of the bucket. Don't forget the door hinge of a decent size.

 

The hinge allows the buckets to easily be swapped and then the probe can be dropped / lowered into the next until the beeper starts going alerting you that the honey has reached the intended filling level.

Yeah, initial stages of testing gluing and testing things

But it looks like we are on to something here, now all it needs is a field test to see if such an idea passes the test of time.

Once have we had time to play around with this idea a bit more, will update this section again.

Until then, happy extracting, hopefully without a big honey spill or kitchen disaster...

Happy beekeeping,

The QuickWings Team

----------------------------------------------------------
Our content is for informational purposes only and do not form a professional relationship. 
Please refer to the full disclaimer on Quickwings pty ltd’s website found here: 
https://quickwings.com.au/policies-and-tcs/
----------------------------------------------------------