Filling and draining of head tanka

[bairdswift]

How do you have your head tank hooked up? What kind of pipe do you use and how is it rooted to the sugar arch. If you have a pre heater do you have it so you can by pass it and turn it off and keep going? Is there a site gage to see how full your tank is. How do you fill this tank up? Is it hard plumed up or so you move hoses around? When your hauling sap how do you hook your pumps up? With cam locks on the drain or stick the hose in the man hole? I would like to be able to drain my head tank outside so I can wash it In place with tossing a few levers. Fill me in on what you do

[Sunday Rock Maple]

We have a 150 gallon round bottom stainless head tank that is filled from a sump pump in the 2.600 gallon concentrate tank. The sump is controlled by a float switch in the head tank that keeps it within 2" from the top (except at the end when concentrate is running out) I think it's important to keep a constand pressure on the evaporator float. The head tank only drains to the evaporator float either straight on, or through the preheater. You need to be able to bypass the preheater and drain it to avoid it freezing and busting between runs. We use cam locks at the RO and at the 3,500 gallon raw sap tank which is feed from a 500 gallon (old milk) tank and a sump pump on a float. The 500 gallon tank can also feed the evaporator if we want to boil raw sap at the end of the evening to chase. Pretty much everything is plumbed with 1" mainline -- the same stuff we use in the bush.

[Big_Eddy]

I have a 200 gallon white plastic tank inside my sugar shack. I back my collection tank trailers down close to the shack, hook a 4' piece of black poly to it and dump into a 5 gal pail with a small pump in it. The pump is connected via clear vinyl pipe and pumps up into the 200 gal storage tank. The storage tank is connected directly to the float box on the evaporator with a flexible hose (cam-locks). I can see the level in the main tank from anywhere in the shack.

To wash, I disconnect the cam-lock from the bottom of the storage tank and connect a drain line instead. I bring 30-50 gals of water down from the house in the sap tank trailer, use the same bucket and pump to transfer it up to the tank, and get up on a ladder and rinse out the insides. My (frozen) thumb on the end of the vinyl hose works well enough to spray into all the corners. At the end of the season we sanitize and pressure wash everything before putting away.

If I have more than 200 gals sap - I leave it in the sap trailers (2 @ 100 gals) until I have space. If I have more than 400 gals I dump the oldest.