The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 8 of 14
The solar melter
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 solar melter does the work a double boiler does with no flame, no water bath, and almost no attention: a glazed box that traps sunlight, heating its interior to sixty to ninety-five degrees Celsius on a good day, comfortably past the sixty-two to sixty-four degrees at which wax itself turns liquid. Wax and debris go in at the top, wax drains down through a filtering screen, and you come back hours later to a clean block.
It needs real sun and real heat to work at all, an ambient temperature above twenty-six degrees Celsius on a genuinely sunny day, and on a cloudy or cool one it does very little.
It also struggles with old dark comb: the wax travels further and slower through the debris, and can cool and congeal partway down before it ever reaches the collecting tray.