honey spinner made out of PVC and 5 gallon buckets

I'm not the most expert bee keeper but I found this person's setup and I knew i wanted to share with mah permies beekeepers and see what they think.

Here's the article if you wanna see all of the pictures and text.

But here's some of the pictures so you can get an idea of what's going on. The first 3 images show what a loaded spinner looks like.








Then, they put them into 5 gallon buckets, and since they weren't quite tall enough, they builder just cut them and stack them!





So that's all the images I'm going to post but there are TONS more in the article and they list all the materials you need and give very detailed directions of how to assemble something like this with gobs of pictures.

i'd love to have a permie try this and let me know if it worked!

I'm not generally a fan of plastic, and PVC in particular is fairly nasty stuff. clever design, though.

I'll stick to a press for honey extracting.

Good blog post recently on Rusty's honeybeesuite site about the silliness of extracting honey - from a commercial point of view, at least - when comb honey routinely sells for three times the amount of extracted honey. Of course, old manky three-seasons-old ex-brood comb isn't very appetising to most of us, so parting the honey from the wax is preferable in at least some instances.

At the farmer's market this summer I sold 40 times more honey than comb. The comb honey was beautifully pristine, and priced only 70% higher than the extracted honey.

I have a top bar hive. Was looking for ways to create my own spinner. I will tweak your design to see if it will work for my combs. Thanks for the idea.

I recently compared spun, heated, filtered honey from a treatment free hive someone kept on my property to simple crush and strain from my own treatment free hive.

The crush and strain was SO much better. 2 side by side hives can have very different honey so I tried to focus on the texture and mouth feel. The wax, pollen and other things that come thru the crush and strain method really adds to the honey experience.

Hey, maker of the honey spinner here! Thanks for all the traffic and for spreading the design. I designed this specifically to be built and used by small backyard operations like myself. A few quick notes.

-The PVC plastic piping I used was from the hardware store. It ought to be ok for the honey spinner as it is the same stuff used for drinkable water supply in houses.

-How wide/deep are the frames in the top bar hive? You might be able to make it work, but even getting medium frames in the buckets was quite tricky.

Let me know if anyone has further questions.

chase hansel wrote:-The PVC plastic piping I used was from the hardware store. It ought to be ok for the honey spinner as it is the same stuff used for drinkable water supply in houses.

my objection to PVC is to do with its entire life cycle, particularly manufacture and what to do with it at the end of its service life. I'm not as concerned about its contact with honey, though that may have issues as well.

still, it's a clever design.

just a thought for you, if the buckets are too tight, you might look for a food grade used barrel, they come in several sizes, not just 55 gallon, I have a 30 gallon that would probably fit any size frame.

I like the clever design of honey spinner but PVC is not a good choice for anything that comes into contact with
drinking water or food. In fact PVC is the worst possible choice you could make as far as plastics go. Every part
of it's life cycle is toxic and it out gasses toxins for it's entire life and in the landfill after it's life.
Here are two quotes that google popped up after searching for PVC Health Concerns,

"Both, from both an environmental and health standpoint, PVC is the most toxic plastic.
Here's why: Vinyl chloride, the chemical used to make PVC, is a known human carcinogen,
according to the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)."

"The natural fire retardancy of PVC is a double-edged sword in that building materials may smolder
for long periods of time giving off hydrogen chloride gas long before visible signs of fire appear.
Hydrogen chloride gas, is a corrosive, highly toxic gas that can cause skin burns and severe long-term respiratory damage."

Here is a link about PVC it's life and concerns.
http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/text_version/chemicals.php?id=84

I am an organic bee keeper and I would not go through the trouble of not using toxins to keep my bee, refrain from
pasteurizing the honey to keep it's enzymes intact and then dunk PVC into the honey.

Most gallon buckets are made with polyethelene and that is a food grade plastic.
I like the clever design and if it could be reworked with food grade materials it would be both
clever and excellent!