Hello! I've been asked to give an opinion:
I have both bottling machines, first I purchased the pneumatic one from Thornes at a convention after having a quick demo. After using it for a year, it's better than hand-bottling but extremely finicky and can't be left setup, the main cons are:
Gravity-fed: Inconsistent fill rate and have to lift honey up quite high to fill it, also tipping the whole thing near the end gets very annoying.
Pneumatic: the units prone to leaks and struggles with thicker honey (as its gravity fed), the compressor (if using a small one) will eventually limit your duty cycle as they get hot quick
Faster than manual, but still slow: It's maybe 30% faster than manual if you consider just the jar filling, but the fettling and cleaning after every session quickly adds up.
Accurate-ish: More accurate than manual filling, but still not super accurate and it can be quite hard to adjust up/down a few grams, I'd say the repeatable accuracy is +/- ~2-5g (which varies depending on honey pressure/thickness).
Can't be left setup: A really terrible design flaw, but when the piston is in the "closed" position, honey can leak into the rear of the piston chamber which prevents the piston from retracting properly. This is guaranteed to happen if you leave the machine sitting with honey in for any length of time, or can happen if you're bottling very runny honey.
Sub-par build quality: The whole thing is quite shoddily made and doesn't feel like it will stand numerous years of use, when I finally got to using it I didn't feel like I got my money's worth.
After using this for a season and a bit, I decided to bite the bullet and spend £750 on Thornes new HD Bottling Machine and wow, what a difference. In my opinion, it's well worth the extra £200 and perfectly fills the gap between manual filling and a £3,000 swienty turntable. I'll list the main things I've found:
Positives:
Can be left setup: Easy to sanitize and seal the bucket and nozzle, so can be left for extended periods (I've left it for weeks) with no adverse effects, starts right back up.
Scalable: The unit itself is fed by a hose, with the right connector you can connect that to any sized setting/bottling tank.
Fast and consistent: It fills jars faster than I can replace and lid them, I'm easily able to do 300-500 jars in a 3 hour stretch without much thought.
Powerful: I thought I might have to have the honey bucket above the jarring machine, but once the pump is primed it has absolutely no problem lifting honey from the floor to table height, even with colder/thick honey.
Accurate: Easily hits a repeatable accuracy of +/- 1g.
Compact: The unit itself is tiny, it's a very compact design with no wasted space and can be setup just about anywhere you can fit a 5gal bucket and a 30x30cm footprint for the actual unit. It also packs down to fit inside the 5gal bucket with ease.
Build quality: This is honestly what shocked me the most. The build quality is superb, everything feels very well manufactured and the components seem fit for purpose, I've done 500+ jars in a single session and it hasn't skipped a beat. The pump motor itself is enormous and powerful, I'd say it easily rivals anything in the cheaper lines of classic impeller-style jarring machines.
Quiet: No compressor, no additional plugs, the unit itself isn't particularly noisy.
Negatives:
Cleaning: Cleaning can be a little finnicky as you need to dismantle the impeller housing, care must be taken not to damage the threads, the mating surfaces, or the small custom o-ring sealing it. The plus side is you really only need to clean it when you're packing it away after the seasons complete. If properly maintained and filled with honey, I see no reason why it couldn't be left setup the entire season.
Conclusion
The HD Bottling machine wins hands down! Knowing what I know now after using it, they could increase the price to over a grand and I'd still buy it, I consider it extremely good value for the money and it will probably last me the rest of my beekeeping career unless things get wildly out of hand. A few other members who have visited to have a nose at it can testify how good it is.
In other and completely unrelated news, I have a pneumatic honey filling machine for sale.
EDIT: Happy to answer any questions or post custom videos if you're curious about a specific feature, but might take me a little while to reply as I don't look at the forums often (far too many opinions).
Video of it in action (in manual mode, it also has an automatic mode that detects the weight of a new jar, tares it, then dispenses the correct weight of honey).
View attachment 37901
Hello! I've been asked to give an opinion:
I have both bottling machines, first I purchased the pneumatic one from Thornes at a convention after having a quick demo. After using it for a year, it's better than hand-bottling but extremely finicky and can't be left setup, the main cons are:
Gravity-fed: Inconsistent fill rate and have to lift honey up quite high to fill it, also tipping the whole thing near the end gets very annoying.
Pneumatic: the units prone to leaks and struggles with thicker honey (as its gravity fed), the compressor (if using a small one) will eventually limit your duty cycle as they get hot quick
Faster than manual, but still slow: It's maybe 30% faster than manual if you consider just the jar filling, but the fettling and cleaning after every session quickly adds up.
Accurate-ish: More accurate than manual filling, but still not super accurate and it can be quite hard to adjust up/down a few grams, I'd say the repeatable accuracy is +/- ~2-5g (which varies depending on honey pressure/thickness).
Can't be left setup: A really terrible design flaw, but when the piston is in the "closed" position, honey can leak into the rear of the piston chamber which prevents the piston from retracting properly. This is guaranteed to happen if you leave the machine sitting with honey in for any length of time, or can happen if you're bottling very runny honey.
Sub-par build quality: The whole thing is quite shoddily made and doesn't feel like it will stand numerous years of use, when I finally got to using it I didn't feel like I got my money's worth.
After using this for a season and a bit, I decided to bite the bullet and spend £750 on Thornes new HD Bottling Machine and wow, what a difference. In my opinion, it's well worth the extra £200 and perfectly fills the gap between manual filling and a £3,000 swienty turntable. I'll list the main things I've found:
Positives:
Can be left setup: Easy to sanitize and seal the bucket and nozzle, so can be left for extended periods (I've left it for weeks) with no adverse effects, starts right back up.
Scalable: The unit itself is fed by a hose, with the right connector you can connect that to any sized setting/bottling tank.
Fast and consistent: It fills jars faster than I can replace and lid them, I'm easily able to do 300-500 jars in a 3 hour stretch without much thought.
Powerful: I thought I might have to have the honey bucket above the jarring machine, but once the pump is primed it has absolutely no problem lifting honey from the floor to table height, even with colder/thick honey.
Accurate: Easily hits a repeatable accuracy of +/- 1g.
Compact: The unit itself is tiny, it's a very compact design with no wasted space and can be setup just about anywhere you can fit a 5gal bucket and a 30x30cm footprint for the actual unit. It also packs down to fit inside the 5gal bucket with ease.
Build quality: This is honestly what shocked me the most. The build quality is superb, everything feels very well manufactured and the components seem fit for purpose, I've done 500+ jars in a single session and it hasn't skipped a beat. The pump motor itself is enormous and powerful, I'd say it easily rivals anything in the cheaper lines of classic impeller-style jarring machines.
Quiet: No compressor, no additional plugs, the unit itself isn't particularly noisy.
Negatives:
Cleaning: Cleaning can be a little finnicky as you need to dismantle the impeller housing, care must be taken not to damage the threads, the mating surfaces, or the small custom o-ring sealing it. The plus side is you really only need to clean it when you're packing it away after the seasons complete. If properly maintained and filled with honey, I see no reason why it couldn't be left setup the entire season.
Conclusion
The HD Bottling machine wins hands down! Knowing what I know now after using it, they could increase the price to over a grand and I'd still buy it, I consider it extremely good value for the money and it will probably last me the rest of my beekeeping career unless things get wildly out of hand. A few other members who have visited to have a nose at it can testify how good it is.
In other and completely unrelated news, I have a pneumatic honey filling machine for sale.
EDIT: Happy to answer any questions or post custom videos if you're curious about a specific feature, but might take me a little while to reply as I don't look at the forums often (far too many opinions).
Video of it in action (in manual mode, it also has an automatic mode that detects the weight of a new jar, tares it, then dispenses the correct weight of honey).
View attachment 37901
Brilliant, thanks so much. Very helpful that you’ve tried both
it probably is for that…
