Steam condensate.

[Tweegs]

I’m going to sneak out here in a few and go order a hood for my little 2X6. Of course I’ll be adding a pre-heater to it using the guidelines established in that Cornell paper published back in ’74.

http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_squa...R/ne_rp388.pdf

Since I don’t have running water in the shack yet, the condensate will be used for a general clean up and wipe down (the wife hates it when I bring her a stack of sticky stuff to clean), the problem is that I don’t know how much condensate to expect. Provisions will have to be made for too much or too little.

There is a blurb in the paper about 980 BTU will generate 1 lb of condensate, but trying to wrap my head around the math this early in the morn has proven futile, better to just get the questions out there.

My pre-heater will be a parallel flow with 1.25” manifolds and about 30’ of ¾ copper. I figure that the hood with pre-heater and the addition of air over/under fire (slated for the ’14 season) should push me up to near 50 GPH. Sizing the pre-heater as stated should give ample flow for an emergency dump without being so large as to be inefficient.

So, if you have a 2X6 with a pre-heater of a similar size, how much condensate, in gallons per hour, do you get?

If your evaporator is larger, what is the diameter of the tube, how many feet of tube do you have, and what is your GPH of condensate? (I can extrapolate from there.)

[Flat Lander Sugaring]

on a night with about 220 to 300 gal to boil I will fill a 6 gal turkey fryer pail about two times

[RileySugarbush]

It depends on a lot of things like how cold your sap is, evap rate, hood and preheater design, but I estimate about 2 to 4 gallons an hour on my 2x6.

[Maplewalnut]

I get about 4 gallons an hour

[Tweegs]

Good, good, good…Thanks guys.

That’s about what I was hoping for.

Spent last season dragging 10 gallons of hot water in two of those 5 gallon insulated drink coolers. It was never quite enough.

Out of curiosity, your rigs are set up the way I intend mine to be with hood/pre-heater/air.

Is 50 GPH evap rate a reasonable expectation?

[RileySugarbush]

My setup is basically the same. 50 is on the high end. We can do better than that if we turn up the AUF but then the wood consumption goes way up.

[Michael Greer]

Last year, we piped the condensate right over to the sink. It keeps a couple of dish-pans full of really hot water constantly. It's great for cleaning everything from the countertops to the filter-press, and we just dump the pan as it gets dirty. The only time we need to haul in water is for final clean-up on the last day, and even then, we run it in through the head tank and heat it through the pans.