How sweet to leave overnight

[optionguru]

I use a home made oil tank evaporator that has 3 steam table pans, 4 this year. Last year I batch boiled until finished each night which was after midnight a couple of times. This year I will have more taps and will no doubt be spending much longer days boiling. My question is, as I move the sap forward to the front pan, that obviously becomes the syrup pan. While doing this I keep adding fresh sap to the rear most pan until out of sap. If I wanted to shut down before finishing off everything in the rear pans can I just leave it overnight in a semi-finished state and cover the pans. I know people talk about leaving the continuous flow pans "sweet". Is there some amount of sugar content that must be reached before the sap will stay good overnight? I caught the bug and have marked more trees and made improvements to the evaporator but I fear my wife will want to shoot me if I have to boil every night. Thanks for your guidance.

[Ed R]

You can definitely leave it over night. If it has all come to a good boil you could probably leave it several days if the temp is under 50 F.

[mikeo]

Sounds like you just need a better hiding place for your guns ;)

[optionguru]

Thanks Ed and Mike you have a good point. She's pretty sneaky though.

[red maples]

When you bring it to a boil even if its raw sap you are killing off probably 99.999 % of the bacteria that was in the raw sap. So you will be fine to leave it for a few days as long its not too warm and if it does get warm just get it to a boil and shut it down if needed.

[Smitty8377]

I once used the same set up and yes you can leave it overnight with no problems

[optionguru]

Thanks for the answers everyone. This will make life a lot easier knowing I'm not locked into finishing the whole batch every time. 54 taps is going to be big for me, when I read about you guys with hundreds of taps I can't imagine the work you all do.

[Balsam Hills]

The key to success is to become more efficient as you grow. There are a number of ways you can do this including flue pans, larger evaporator, reverse osmosis, etc. Half the fun is trying to figure all of that out. :lol: