# Dadant Mini-Melter



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Funny you mention it, I ordered one today. They said it was the last one, you might be out of luck.  I do however have a line on a used one but won't know more on it for a month or so.

Jim told me it has two heaters, one that heats the water and another that heats a plate that melts the wax. There are also two gates, one for honey and one for wax.

Lucky for me it is supposed to come with full instructions. I will copy them for you when I get them and fax to you if you want.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

Thanks Bill.

I talked to the Dadant rep for the Michigan branch last weekend at a meeting. He said he'd already sold 4 of them recently. He mentioned that it will definately darken the honey and might not be able to be sold. 

I was just curious about how much volume it can handle and how much the honey is darkened.

I'll be curious to see how it works for you! I've got to come up with some kind of thing here before the season though.... Last year I let the cappings drip dry.... not feasible this year!


----------



## [email protected] (Aug 1, 2004)

*Dadant mini-melter*

I have never used the Dadant mini-melter, but I expect it is an excellent tool. If the honey darkens, I think the heater for the water may be set too high. As I understand these things, the idea is to melt the wax (which sits on top of the honey) without heating the honey underneath. I've seen the wax and honey results from someone who uses one and both are excellent.

But, are you sure you want to spend $900+? To me, it would take 1,000 lbs or so of cappings to justify it. I personally use the Kelley melter http://go.netgrab.com/secure/kelleystore/asp/product.asp?product=156 It is much less expensive. Caution...while this produces excellent wax, 100% of the heat comes from below so it will darken the honey. I have a bakery customer for the honey, as otherwise it is largely unsaleable.

Good luck,
Lloyd


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

>I was just curious about how much volume it can handle and how much the honey is darkened.

They advertise to uncap directly into the tank. I assumed ... Oh boy, well I'll know next weekend (not this weekend) when I give it it's first workout.

I think Lloyd is right about the darkening of the honey, however I was cautioned that it will darken it some. Then again, I have customers that prefer dark honey.


----------



## DChasey (Feb 18, 2007)

*Dadant Mini Melter*

I used a Senior Brand Melter for years, I have down sized both in hive count and equipment. I purchased a Mini Melter last year and was pleased with its operation. I did not experience and darkening of the honey. The wax came off nicely. In fact I was able to set the melter on the old brand melter stand and use a steam jiggle knife above the hopper and uncap directly into the melter. Betwen the heater for the water jacket and the heater for the melting grid, it is easy to control the wax / honey seperation process.

I was told by Dadant that the earlier Mini melters they sold only had a top heating grid, and no water jacket. Apparently these earlier melters did not work as well as the ones manufactured now.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

Thanks for the input guys.

I'm not sure how many hives the mini-melter is designed to handle... Its probably more of a volume thing at a time. I hope to be able to use it for up to 200 or so hives. I'll be at 100+ hopefully by this fall but will probably only be getting cappings off of around 60 hives this year. 

Part of my concern for the honey aspect is that I run 8 frames to the super in order to allow my cowen to uncap all the frames. This does produce alot of wax and honey in the uncapping process. Because of the amount of honey I've considered a spinner but then I will still have to deal with the wax.

I guess I'm trying to solve both problems at once but don't want to noticeably darken the honey as there is likely to be alot of it. I've been using a solar melter need to find a better more streamlined method for my particular needs.


----------



## [email protected] (Aug 1, 2004)

I also use 8 frames to a super and, yes, that produces a lot of honey with the wax. Try uncapping directly into the melter. With 60 hives that should work fine...as it should with 100. With 200 you may want a spinner, but I'd avoid it as long as possible. Once you go that route, you just take the wax from the spinner and put it into the melter. But you don't 'turn it on' until you get enough cappings in there to bother with.

Just keep the water under 130 degrees and you won't degrade your honey.

Hope this helps.

Lloyd


----------



## WG Bee Farm (Jan 29, 2005)

I have used one for 6 years. I modified my chain uncapper and fit the mini melter under it.
This way I uncap directly over the melter.
The only problem I had was getting the temp. adjusted correctly. Make sure you heat up the unit to full temp. before starting or you can overrun the melter waiting for it to catch up. I just wish I had the larger unit that they sell. But, it will have to wait.
Frank


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

Well... I placed my order for the mini-melter. I'll be picking it up from Dadant at a bee meeting this weekend. It is definately pricey but still think its my best alternative given my set-up. I'll post reviews (if I remember ) after the honey crop is in this season.

Thanks for the feedback.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

WG Bee Farm said:


> I have used one for 6 years. I modified my chain uncapper and fit the mini melter under it.
> This way I uncap directly over the melter.
> The only problem I had was getting the temp. adjusted correctly. Make sure you heat up the unit to full temp. before starting or you can overrun the melter waiting for it to catch up. I just wish I had the larger unit that they sell. But, it will have to wait.
> Frank


Frank.

How many hives are you running? What kind of volume are you running thru it at one time? (ie. # of supers etc?) Does it seem to keep up when at full temp?

Thanks.


----------



## WG Bee Farm (Jan 29, 2005)

Last two years I have been in the 60- 85 range. Before that 100 - 120.
I hope to get back to 100 this year. I found it could handle +/- 40 supers a day approx.
(once the kinks were work out) Working mostly alone, at nights and weekends.
It has worked good for me. If you set the temps too high it can darken the honey, but bakers grade has to be sold also.
Frank


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

WG Bee Farm said:


> Last two years I have been in the 60- 85 range. Before that 100 - 120.
> I hope to get back to 100 this year. I found it could handle +/- 40 supers a day approx.
> (once the kinks were work out) Working mostly alone, at nights and weekends.
> It has worked good for me. If you set the temps too high it can darken the honey, but bakers grade has to be sold also.
> Frank


What temp have you found to be optimal? Not darkening honey and yet still handling the input?


----------



## WG Bee Farm (Jan 29, 2005)

I don't remember. I'll have to go to the honey house and look. I just kept fiddling until I got it right.
Frank


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Well, the blessed day arrived last Thursday and I took it to the farm to get it all set up to go.

I made a nice stand for it to set on with a shelf for the wax bucket then looked around for a power source to plug it into. Both of the heaters have real thick cords. One is 1700 watts the other is 1750 watts, I started to add watts and thought I better talk to an electrician about power requirements.

Dave, my electrician, said I need two separate 20 amp circuits with 20 amp receptacles, one for each heater, krap.  Well, now I know what I am doing next Saturday morning, lucky I have extra room in my breaker box. 

The instructions say that it does darken honey some, but staying below 120 and for short periods will not darken it very much. Obviously the hotter and longer will darken it faster and darker. I am not too concerned about it at this point, I just need to get last years honey processed. 

BTW, I have some beautiful sunflower comb honey, very bright yellow in color. It has a real nice flavor, a little crunchy, but tasty.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

I picked up mine on Saturday. I haven't even had time to start looking at the directions yet. It is bigger than I thought it would be! For some reason I thought it would be smaller! 

Got any pics of that stand you made?


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

I was expecting something smaller too, but this is OK. It's billed as good for around one to two hundred hives and no faster than I am it should be just right.

My stand is a simple 2x4 and plywood construction, nothing fancy. I didn't have my camera last weekend so I will take some this weekend. The best thing I did was to make a lip on the sides to keep the unit from sliding off.

I was not aware that concrete will tarnish stainless steel according to Dadant, they suggest that all stainless be insulated from concrete.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

Actually I was glad it was larger. I know the volume of cappings I had under my cowen last season and wasn't sure from the pics if it could handle it. Now that I see it... It is better than I thought. Well looks better than I thought anyway... Time will tell on how it operates.

Yeah I've gotta build a stand as well. But hey... why re-invent the wheel if you've got a stand made... I'll just copy yours and modify for my set up! 

My concrete floor has a special ceramic coating so I don't think I'd have an issue... but I didn't plan on having it on the floor anyway. 

I hadn't heard that about the stainless and concrete.


----------



## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

"My concrete floor has a special ceramic coating so I don't think I'd have an issue"

Details please....I need to do something with my concrete floor as well.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

peggjam said:


> "My concrete floor has a special ceramic coating so I don't think I'd have an issue"
> 
> Details please....I need to do something with my concrete floor as well.


I wish I had more details... a friend of mine did it for me.... Supposedly you have to have some sort of license to do it... it is some type of floor that is used in commercial applications.... You have to mix compounds and if you wait too long it "takes off" on you... .it starts going crazy and has some type of chemical reaction.... and then the batch is ruined....He did it all for me.... I had him make a floor with nice grit to it... like sandpaper for avoiding slippery floor.... In hindsight it was a really bad idea.... while the floor isn't slippery.... The wax and propolis... are nearly impossible to remove..... I've had to get on the floor with my hive tool trying to get some of it up.... I wish I had done a smooth floor. 

I don't know what it costs.... I had alot of split wood he wanted and we traded that and some honey for the floor.... I came out WAY AHEAD on that trade!


----------



## Otter (Feb 20, 2008)

There are paints available for concrete, some of which are formulated for floors. Finding something formulated for the food-service and/or dairy industry would be my attack, as those also make wide use of stainless.


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Dan Williamson said:


> Yeah I've gotta build a stand as well. But hey... why re-invent the wheel if you've got a stand made... I'll just copy yours and modify for my set up!


OK, Dan, I finally got the pictures on myspace. Look in the extracting honey album.


----------



## BerkeyDavid (Jan 29, 2004)

Hi guys been lurking on this thread because of interest in melter. The floor covering is epoxy no doubt you can get the kits at home depot.

Thanks for talking about the minmelter Mitch and me are interested in that too.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

BerkeyDavid said:


> Hi guys been lurking on this thread because of interest in melter. The floor covering is epoxy no doubt you can get the kits at home depot.
> 
> Thanks for talking about the minmelter Mitch and me are interested in that too.


There are epoxy kits at stores like home depot. The floor I have is something different. You can't buy it like that. It can only be purchased by a licensed applicator. It is used in industrial applications. I'll have to ask the guy what the material is... or why it can't be purchased by just anyone.


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Well the instructions leave something to be desired.  "At the end of the day the honey is bottled, the wax is in cakes..." 

After extracting fifty supers I never did get any wax to flow out of the tank. Perhaps I didn't have the honey spout high enough, I dunno, I'll figure it out next time I guess.

And what a mess I have in the tank with all that wax and the start up honey and slumgum to clean out. Guess I'll have to process the wax through the Prestos.

Dan, before you fill the tank get a large funnel and a valve for the drain, the jacket holds 16 gallons of water.

On a positive note, I did get 15 gallons of Buckwheat honey from the field I planted.


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Can anyone give some tips on how to regulate the heat on this blasted thing? :s What a mess! 

How do you stuff the wax under the baffle? 

How are you to get that slumgum rake under the hard cap of wax?

I set the water temp on 125 and the wax heater between 150 and 175.

After uncapping over 50 supers I hardly got any wax to flow out.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

BULLSEYE BILL said:


> Can anyone give some tips on how to regulate the heat on this blasted thing? :s What a mess!
> 
> How do you stuff the wax under the baffle?
> 
> ...


Hey Bill...

I ran 80 supers in my last batch. I found that unless you have alot of honey with your cappings or have more cappings than 80 supers produces that Ijust didn't get a good flow of wax going. I ended up straining most of the honey out of the cappings and filling most of the space with water. Then added the cappings. I set the wax heater at 200 and the water at 150. Let it sit until a layer of wax was melted and then just added water in slow increments. I got some really pretty wax this way but its labor intensive. When I tried to run it as I was processing I burned about 10 gal of honey. That's an expensive lesson. I'm still trying to figure out the right config. Frankly I just think I need to be processing larger quantities for it to work efficiently.


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

I finally finished with extracting for the year  yea! 

I found that my problem was that I was trying not to use enough heat. Once I turned the wax burner up to at least 200 it all started to work better, but I still had to push the cappings under the baffle with a 1x2 or the cappings side would overflow. In all I got about five gallons of wax from 5000 pounds of honey extracted.

Even though I kept the heat down on the water heater(<120) all the honey is dark, some of it on the verge of tasting a bit burnt.

Clean up of the blasted thing is another story.  I have a 1/3 of the tank full of wax/cappings and honey to strain and melt. 

Installing a valve on the drain has helped a lot when it comes time to drain the sixteen gallons of water.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

BULLSEYE BILL said:


> Even though I kept the heat down on the water heater(<120) all the honey is dark, some of it on the verge of tasting a bit burnt.
> 
> Clean up of the blasted thing is another story.  I have a 1/3 of the tank full of wax/cappings and honey to strain and melt.
> 
> Installing a valve on the drain has helped a lot when it comes time to drain the sixteen gallons of water.


Which is what happened to me on my first batch. 10 gal of burnt honey. That was a $280 expense just using my 5gal pail prices. That's why in my second round I let the cappings drain in the hot room over night and the next day started up the melter. I filled the tank with water up to cover the screen that will prevent cappings from going into the honey outlet. The I added the cappins pushing them down into the water and filled the tank as full as I could get it with cappings. I also had to push the cappings under the baffle as I added more but this system Worked MUCH better as I didn't have to worry about the honey burning and could heat the water up much hotter than I would the honey. 

It defeated the purpose of processing the wax while I worked but I just don't think I'm doing it right or don't have the volume etc. There is definately a trick to getting it to melt on the fly as your work. I haven't figured that out yet.


----------



## BULLSEYE BILL (Oct 2, 2002)

Obviously Dadants instruction manual is lacking if we both could not get the hang of it.  We really need to get them on the list and help us figure out what we are not doing right. Using it as you are to just melt wax in water is defeating it's purpose and a waste of money. I am sure that my reluctance to turn the heat up is a major factor in my problems.

The last batch I did seemed to work better and almost like it was supposed to by the advertising in as much as I got the wax to flow. What I did differently was to turn the heat up on the wax melting grid to 200 and at one point when finishing up to almost 220. At 200 + I could use the subgum 'rake' and remove the slum from around the grid which made the wax flow much better. Until that point I never had the entire top of the wax melted and couldn't determine how I was going to use a rake.

I don't believe that the tank heater has to be very hot, 115 worked well and did not hurt the taste of the honey. The darkness could be from the the fact that it was fall honey and was dark to begin with. For the most part the grid is between the melted and unmelted wax so there shouldn't be any excessive heating of the honey. Some of the honey in the last batches were actually light spring honey that wasn't ready to pull in the spring, but adding it to the dark honey didn't lighten the color of the fall at all.

All in all I think the unit should and will work as advertised, I am mostly floundered by the fact that I have to push the cappings under the baffle and the end cleanup is horrific to deal with. The dark honey will be used to brew with by either me or others, but it would be nice to figure out how to keep the light spring honey from turning dark.


----------



## Dan Williamson (Apr 6, 2004)

BULLSEYE BILL said:


> Using it as you are to just melt wax in water is defeating it's purpose and a waste of money. I


My thoughts exactly.


----------

