ennismaple
04-15-2013, 05:16 PM
Here's the long winded version of our last boil in Saturday. I get to the sugar camp before 8am to start RO'ing the sap that's waiting for me, start the pumps and pressure wash the front pan. As I start the pumps I do the math and realize - holy crap I've got 5,000 gallons of sap in front of me! Gonna be a long day. A few hours later my help arrives and gets the first 525 gal load of the day - it's so yellow I tell him to go dump it over the hill. I should have just gone home at that point!
I start the first fire and as the pans warm I notice some crap in the sight tube on the side of the flue pan. No biggie - I'll rinse it out. When I take it off the "sap" comes out like a glob of thick snot. That's not good... So I stick my hand in the flue pan and the entire thing is a mass of jellied, slimy snot. Crap... The almost syrup in the front pan was OK, so is the fresh sap coming in so I decide to try and salvage what I have. A half hour later I've added a bunch of cold water to the flue pan and the fire has died down so I drain the pan and hose out the crap for an hour. I fire up again after noon for the 2nd time.
The only time I've boiled more with less to show for it was the day we did the demonstration boil on our Force 5 using water. Nine hours of firing later I've made 63 gallons of 'C' syrup (which actually tasted pretty good) out of 4500 gallons of sap and I'm so tired of getting so little coming off the pans that I decided to leave 100+ gallons of concentrate and not bother to boil it through. It brought back bad memories of firing on our old inefficient natural draft 5x16 evaporator before the RO - lots of steam and smoke with very little to show for it!
I'd never seen ropey syrup/sap before but because of people's experiences from Mapletrader I knew what I was dealing with right away. What was in the pans had only sat for 3 days and it had gotten to the freezing mark or below every night and 2 of those days it barely got above freezing. I was very surprised this happened so quickly in these conditions.
Lesson learned - wash out the flue pan more often and check on whats in the pans before you light the fire!
I start the first fire and as the pans warm I notice some crap in the sight tube on the side of the flue pan. No biggie - I'll rinse it out. When I take it off the "sap" comes out like a glob of thick snot. That's not good... So I stick my hand in the flue pan and the entire thing is a mass of jellied, slimy snot. Crap... The almost syrup in the front pan was OK, so is the fresh sap coming in so I decide to try and salvage what I have. A half hour later I've added a bunch of cold water to the flue pan and the fire has died down so I drain the pan and hose out the crap for an hour. I fire up again after noon for the 2nd time.
The only time I've boiled more with less to show for it was the day we did the demonstration boil on our Force 5 using water. Nine hours of firing later I've made 63 gallons of 'C' syrup (which actually tasted pretty good) out of 4500 gallons of sap and I'm so tired of getting so little coming off the pans that I decided to leave 100+ gallons of concentrate and not bother to boil it through. It brought back bad memories of firing on our old inefficient natural draft 5x16 evaporator before the RO - lots of steam and smoke with very little to show for it!
I'd never seen ropey syrup/sap before but because of people's experiences from Mapletrader I knew what I was dealing with right away. What was in the pans had only sat for 3 days and it had gotten to the freezing mark or below every night and 2 of those days it barely got above freezing. I was very surprised this happened so quickly in these conditions.
Lesson learned - wash out the flue pan more often and check on whats in the pans before you light the fire!