The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 7 of 14
The double boiler
All chapters
- Seven kilos of honey for one of wax
- Why drawn comb is never thrown away
- Cappings, the clean wax
- Old brood comb
- A kilo a year
- Never direct heat
- The double boiler
- The solar melter
- The steam melter
- Filtering and grades
- Rotating the brood comb
- What wax is worth
- Drawing comb costs stores
- What a kilo can become
A double boiler is the cheapest way into rendering, and for a small batch it is often the right one. Wax sits in an inner pot, never over the flame directly, floating in or heated by a water bath held between seventy-one and eighty-five degrees Celsius, comfortably below the discolouration line and nowhere near the flash point.
A batch takes thirty to sixty minutes of attention, and the whole setup, usually a pair of repurposed pots you never use for food again, costs twenty to sixty units of money. What it does not give you is a great recovery rate: sixty to seventy-five percent of the available wax comes back clean, and every batch demands your hands and eyes the whole time it runs.
For an occasional small lot of cappings that trade is fine; for anything larger, the labour adds up fast.