any ideas?

[doop]

Hello everyone. I have been getting the itch to start getting ready for the upcoming season, and was wondering what I could do to be a little more efficient. This is my third year and I still have a lot to learn so was looking for ideas. I have about 100 taps, and my evaporator is 28 inches by 7 ft. I was thinking about dividers in the pan, but dont know if it would be worth it. Here is a pic. I would be happy to hear any and all ideas from the seasoned vets. Thanks.

[ericjeeper]

I am far from a seasoned vet. But I would be adding a blower to the firebox.

[saekeaton64]

I would add some arch board or ceramic fiber insulation to reflect the heat back to the pan, add firebrick to the firebox, and add a blower fan for forced draft. Fairly cheap upgrades that will greatly increase you evaporation rate.

[heus]

Dividers would help you to get a somewhat continuous flow, instead of batch-making.

[spencer11]

insulate your arch and put a blower on it, also dividers will help with the gradient

[doop]

Thanks for the replies. What do you use for blower and where/how is it installed? If I were to put dividers in how would you place them?

[spencer11]

a squirrel cage blower is what alot of people use, or you could get really fancy and get one from grainger or place like it and put air under and air over your fire. as for dividers i would put one cross wise in the middle, then have probably 4 running length wise, so would kind of have 2 pans in one! then use connectors to attach the "2 pans"

[Big_Eddy]

Hello everyone. I have been getting the itch to start getting ready for the upcoming season, and was wondering what I could do to be a little more efficient. This is my third year and I still have a lot to learn so was looking for ideas. I have about 100 taps, and my evaporator is 28 inches by 7 ft. I was thinking about dividers in the pan, but dont know if it would be worth it. Here is a pic. I would be happy to hear any and all ideas from the seasoned vets. Thanks.

That's a lot of pan for 100 taps. If you're batching it (which you have to with no dividers) then you're looking at 200+ gallons of sap into the pan before you're getting anywhere close to syrup and even then it's going to be touchy trying to finish off. I would expect you end up with several days sap into the pan before you are able to take off, and have had some nervous moments as it approaches syrup.

I'd recommend you either get some smaller pans made and transfer pan to pan, or you add full dividers across the pan every 18" or so and ladle from section to section. That way you'll be able to finish off in smaller increments and won't have as much of your investment "at risk" at any given time. If you had 200 trees, I'd suggest a flow pan (same dividers but with openings on opposite sides) but at 100 taps, I'd want the ability to have different depths of sap in each section or even to fill one section with water while I finish off in the others.

28" x 7' is a pretty efficient shape - changing to a flow process won't reduce the time needed to boil off, but it will allow you to work with the daily collection amounts instead of having to process a number of days worth of sap all at once.

Fans etc as suggested by others can increase the boil rate.