kevs

[Kev]

have 101 buckets out, emptied everything between 5 an 6 pm last night. have 11 buckets to go yet tonight. those are at the shack. 185 gal of sap collected so far today so i suspect to have over 200 to cook tonight.
20 gal per hour average so it will be a long one!
that should put me at around 1200 gal so far this season. but untill this last weekend I only had 69 out. I thought it was more but I was counting buckets not hung and thought it was 78. I had missed some, someone did not put them all where they belong. unfortunately that was me lol I suppose I could blame my lab, she wont mind

[Kev]

1555 gal of sap for the season. about 24 gal of syrup
ran out of fuel oil. finished the season with crude bio diesel. very dirty. and required adding more air to the mix. (had the air mix on the burner blower clear open and was still not enough. reduced orifice size on oil squirter. plugged that orifice. went back to the biggest one we have. added a squirrel cage fan to the rig. that cleaned the burn up enough, just. peak rate hit 28.5 gal per hour. averaged 25 gal per hour for that night after accidently flooding the pan 4 1/2 hours into that cook.
ran the final 55 gal through the evap the other night averaged 22 gal per hour including the start up.
have a lot of trial and error to go before I can run vegi oil for a season. there is so much gunk on the bottom of the pan that is gooey the brush just smears it around.
I am not at all sure I want to go to the trouble of heating the oil and buying lye and methenol and the whole BS
I an leaning more towards filtering finer and higher pressure to atomize the oil. if tests do not go well in that route this summer, I might just go to natural gas next season