25% Fail rate with Blue Bags

[Cindee]

We bought our usual amount of blue bags which is 100 bags. This year 25 of those had leaks in their corners or very small pinholes in the center of the bags. This is the most failures we ever had. Where do you buy or order your blue bags?

[Loch Muller]

Bought mine from CDL in Rutland, VT and only had 2 out of 80 leak. One hole was due to wind pushing the bag against the tree and the other was too close to a juniper bush.

[heus]

Our squirrels decided to feast on the 190 we put out. Went through probably 325 bags on those taps. None leaked out of the box, though. I will never use bags in the woods again.

[jmayerl]

Sorry to hear about your bags. In the past 3 years I have used 2500 bags bought from 3 different stores and have only had a few leak. All those leaks were from getting too close to a branch or briar.

[Super Sapper]

I also had a large number leak this year. Some were squirrel but some I do know what caused the little holes. I got mine at Maple Hollow.

[Cindee]

Ours are not from squirrels or bushes. I examined one closely and even took a magnifying glass and I can clearly see it is a very poor seal on the edges. 2 yrs ago we got ours at Fleet Farm and those were ridiculously failures but Fleet did not care. We also got ours at Maple Hollow and I will follow up to tell them perhaps they can pass it on to their distributor. We are in the thick of things here in Mountain. We have 161 pints finished, bags are half full, found more leakers yesterday and today they should be running like champions. We need to get more jars because we only have 2 left. Next problem, where can we sell all this syrup?

[lastwoodsman]

About 10 to 15% of ours leaked this yr . I attribute it to putting them out and then hanging for a month empty blowing in the wind and then filling to the top late in the season. Never had the problem before.

[Daryl]

We try to leave a small amount of sap in the bag if we know that wind is forcast. We still lost near 50 % both this year and also last year.
The seal in the bottom was bad.

[Loch Muller]

I use the leaving a little sap in the bag when its windy trick too. I also put my bags out after I've gone through all the buckets if I'm only putting part of my taps out. I didn't notice any seal problems with my bags. Do they all come from one or two manufacturers or are there more? Maybe one doesn't use as good of a glue to bond them. Could be an aging problem as well?

[warners point]

I used 340 bags this season. 250 of them were bought last season and sat in the box until March. We only had 5 leakers and I think it was from emptying bags with ice in them. I've been very pleased so far with less than a dozen leakers in 2 years.

[supersapper]

I had about 15 leakers this year. I had 24 on sap sack holders and 20 on PVC holders. So about. A third were leakers. These bags came from Fleet Farm and come from Anderson Maple. I won't buy bags from Fleet Farm again. Where can you buy bulk bags?

[red maples]

I got some from Bascom's and the maple guys, I had 1 seam leak out of 60 but I know I had a 2-3 squirrel chews I saw them near the bags when they were sitting idol for more than a few days which happened a lot this year. but 15% leakers is bad!!!