boiling down ???

[garyp]

Well its me again my question this time is this will be my first year on my new pan 30''x57'' , The other day I put 5 gallons of water in to see how deep 5 gals was, well its about 3/4'' deep. That means there about 4 gals of sap left to boil down and that's to much to boil down in the house.
Should I just shut down with about a 1'' left and start again the next day or empty the pan and stock pile for a later boil
By the way I'm tapping about 50-60 trees and plan on boiling when I get around 40-50 gals

[Dennis H.]

It sounds like you are batch boiling in a big flat pan right?
Are you saying that you have 4 gals of sap or 4 gals of almost syrup that you have to finish?

When I was doing batch boiling I would boil down all the sap I could in the day and shut things down. Then the next day I would fire it back up and start adding more sap.
Once the temp was telling me that it was close to syrup I would take it all off and finish it on a propane burner.

[lpakiz]

On my 2X3 flat pan, I found that it took about 100 gallons total of sap to boil down to syrup and still have a safe level of liquid in the pan. I ended the session with about 2 1/2 gallons syrup, which was less than 1 inch deep. Boil slow towards the end.