tested the new oil tank evap

[ckkrotz]

We fired up our new oil tank evaporator today. It was awesome! It took about 20 minutes to get the pans boiling(the water was quite cold to start), which seems pretty good to me... I'm going to try to get some pictures soon. We have 3 full steam pans and a half steam pan. We will probably be lining the pans with wood stove gasket, but even without that it didn't smoke as bad as the pans did last year on our block arch. Really looking forward to next weekend when we can fire it up with sap and get an idea what the boil rate will be.

[ckkrotz]

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Here's one picture of the new evaporator. Planning on doing our first batch of sap on it tomorrow, so we'll have more pics tomorrow.

[ckkrotz]

Boiled down about 25 gallons of sap... had to figure out how to keep the smoke stack up, and hadn't gotten the front pan in the mail yet, so it took about 5 hours to go from 25 gallons to 3 gallons, then we finished it on the grill and stove... next time we'll be able to finish it further on the evaporator, since we have the front pan now.
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ETA: and yes, Chris is HOLDING UP the stack in that picture... the winds were pretty crazy, and it kept blowing over... this was while we were waiting for the new connector piece after the first one broke... finally got the stack fixed, and now it's being held in place by wires on all sides.