Rule of thumb? When to go to mainline?

[HyeOnMaple]

I live in the city, but am blessed to have a number of friends with maples, and some have a little bush. My questions are:
How do you make your decision to run tubing vs. several buckets?
At what distance do you start running mainline vs. drop tubing? Does it matter on the number of taps on that line (if so, how many is too many)? Is it the distance to the collection center (if so, how far)?
Thanx folks!

-7F tomorrow AM, think I'll sleep in.

[PerryW]

tubing vs. several buckets?

You really have to think about the cost of the tubing run and the hassle of dealing with collecting from a barrell vs. the cost of buckets and the hassle of collecting buckets. For a general rule, roadside trees get buckets and if I can find 10 taps within 100' up and away from the road, I will hook piping up.

Once I get more then 20 or thirty taps (on gravity), I would go with a mainline. Of course, if there were only 40 or 50 taps total in the bush, I might just run two 5/16" lateral tubing runs and avoid having to run a mainline with it's associated wire supports and side-pulls. (for vaccu8m, you should only have 5-10 taps on a 5/16" lateral maximum)

Not sure about your last question, but, as long as you have downhill pitch, you can run laterals as far as you want. I have some groups of 30-40 gravity taps that are all piped together w/ 5/16" tubing and the flow down a steep hill 400' until they finally dump into a mainline.

[spencer11]

Well for me, most of my trees are on a hill, within 30 feet of eachother, and there is about 200 taps in a few acres. There are some other trees that are out there but sine i will have all those trees on vac next year, thats really te point that make me put everything on tubing

[Hop Kiln Road]

Hye -

Small operations should use buckets whenever possible in order to focus on sugar content of sap and tap placement. Typically a small operation has a limited evaporation capacity yet access to abundant sap, so from an efficiency standpoint, only the sweetest trees should be tapped. From the calculation below, it is better to identify and tap a 3% tree than a 1.4% tree. My goal is to produce .5 gal of syrup per tap per season from gravity lines, which I think is doable.


%Sugar - Gal/Tap/Season Needed to Make .5 Gallon of Syrup

1.0 - 43.0
1.1 - 39.1
1.2 - 35.8
1.3 - 33.1
1.4 - 30.7
1.5 - 28.7
1.6 - 26.9
1.7 - 25.3
1.8 - 23.9
1.9 - 22.6
2.0 - 21.5
2.1 - 20.5
2.2 - 19.5
2.4 - 17.9
2.6 - 16.5
2.8 - 15.4
3.0 - 14.3
3.2 - 13.4
3.4 - 12.6
3.6 - 11.9
3.8 - 11.3
4.0 - 10.8

Only with buckets can the seasonal volumes and sweetest of individual trees be determined. Then comes the critical issue of actual tap placement in the tree, and, finally the issue of buckets versus lines versus mainlines, which has even more variables.

Bruce

[spencer11]

Depending on how many trees you have, tap all of them, if you tap all tour trees you will get more sap regardless if you tap half your trees that are the 3% ones. Although it cone down to buying more stuff etc, if taping all of your trees isnt realistic go with what brice said

[gentlemanfarmervt]

i too am setting up system with good ol' gravity this year and could use a rule of thumb to stick to, or an insight as this is my first year and my setup is all surplus goods...just want to get what i can i guess...