Min. on a 600

[Amber Gold]

I've got a situation this year. We're temporarily going up to ~1500+ taps this season on a 250 RO and I'm concerned about being able to process it all. 800+ taps will be on high vacuum, ~400 will be on med. vac., and 2-300 will be on gravity tubing. All sap is trucked to the SH, and doesn't start showing up until the afternoon. IMO, the 250 will be about maxed out on an average day...say 1500 gal and not able to keep up with a good run. Do you agree?

Because of this, I'm considering getting a 600 RO, but I'm not 100% sure, so I thought I'd bounce this off you guys. The 400 on med. vac. will be going away next season, but the 2-300 gravity taps will hopefully be growing. If I can get permission to run a new mainline across his backyard, my 800 tap vac. woods will be growing to about 1000 taps. So basically, after this season I know I have 1100 taps total, likely more. My concern with getting a 600 is, on the 0.5gpt days, I'm not going to generate enough perm. to wash the membrane. Can I manage this with a 600 or will I be RO oversized at that point?

Thanks for any input.

[jgrenier]

last year I ran 1450 tap with 950 of them on 15"of vac. the rest were either gravity or buckets. I ran the same RO that you have and i would recirculate to 8+%. the ro would not keep up with my 2x6 evaporator.

[Potters3]

Look into the 600. But I think I would roll the dice and try to get thru this year with the RO you have, I will be using a 250 this year on 1600 taps. That is all the RO my wallet could handle this year. I plan on trying to RO 1 day and boil the next. I will have to recirculate to and from my tank until I have 6 or 8% then boil. Luckily I have a frriend that is willing and able to go up the Sugarhouse around noon time and start the RO for me. Hopefully some days we ahve enough concentrate to boil when I get out of work

[wiam]

As far as the permeate on a slow day, I have about 500 gallons of permeate storage so I can have extra to wash on a slow day. This is with a 250 RO. I would be comfortable up to 2000 taps with mine, but I can start ro as soon as I have sap.

[tuckermtn]

I just bought a bigger permeate tank. I ran my 500 gph RO the first year with 650 low tech vacuum taps. Never worried about not having enough permeate. Had a 500 gal perm. tank. Now have 1000 gal since the used poly tank I bought was the same $ as new 550, so I just went bigger. Looking forward to having more perm in storage for exactly the reason you describe. If you can swing it, I would not hesitate to go to a bigger RO.

[Amber Gold]

For this season, I have a 650 gal dedicated perm. tank, and I have a 550 gal poly tank I could also dump perm. to as well. I would just need to pump it over to the perm. tank to get it into the RO.

In the past, we've processed 1600 gal of sap, but it meant starting it early afternoon, and generally not starting boiling until after dinner. We recirc. for a while so we can get high conc. levels to conserve wood. This season, we have a 1 y.o. w/ an afternoon nap, and a 1st grader that gets off the bus. My wife generally collects the sap, so it'll be harder this year coordinating sap collection in the afternoon w/ the kids' schedules. We have processed more in a day, but it means not boiling as high of conc. and burning more wood.

Swinging it's the hard part. It wasn't in this year's budget for improvements.

Thanks

[ennismaple]

If you get 1GPT that means 1500 gallons of sap and 6 hours of RO processing. This is not unreasonable. You can always run the RO for a few hours and recirculate before firing up the evaporator.

[nymapleguy607]

I don't know much on the topic so I might be completly off base. Could you possibly add another membrane to your RO? That would put you into the 375gph range and would most likely be cheaper than a 600 unit.

[Amber Gold]

If I keep the 250, I would have to get new membranes for it to make sure it'd keep up with my production requirements. The other ones work well, but not as well as new ones. A third tower would require some electrical upgrades I'm sure, plus would be expensive, and likely wouldn't make sense when I could get into a 600 for probably close to the same money. I think the 3hp pressure pump is good for 400gph, so in theory, yes this would work.

[wiam]

If I keep the 250, I would have to get new membranes for it to make sure it'd keep up with my production requirements. The other ones work well, but not as well as new ones. A third tower would require some electrical upgrades I'm sure, plus would be expensive, and likely wouldn't make sense when I could get into a 600 for probably close to the same money. I think the 3hp pressure pump is good for 400gph, so in theory, yes this would work.

Are you running xle membranes? I like mine. Much higher flow than the nf270 that I had.

[Amber Gold]

If I keep it, I'd change to H2O's 70-4040. Just need a new plug adapter, and shorten the nipple to make 'em work...no drilling required. Looks to be comparable to the XLE's, but fiberglass wrapped and doesn't cost much more. I used the XLE's last year, but they passed sugar bad...not positive why. Once they settled in, I think the XLE's were around 250-270gph. Lapierre will only sell NF-90's for the 250's.

[wiam]

If I keep it, I'd change to H2O's 70-4040. Just need a new plug adapter, and shorten the nipple to make 'em work...no drilling required. Looks to be comparable to the XLE's, but fiberglass wrapped and doesn't cost much more. I used the XLE's last year, but they passed sugar bad...not positive why. Once they settled in, I think the XLE's were around 250-270gph. Lapierre will only sell NF-90's for the 250's.

Fiberglass should not change sugar passage. Only time my xle's passed sugar I had o-ring/adapter problem.

[Amber Gold]

The XLE's were out of round when I pulled them out...not sure why. While I was troubleshooting the sugar passage, I pulled the membranes out multiple times and checked and replaced o-rings. Still passed. The only good thing out of it is I have a spare set of membranes I can use as a demo for customers.