Releaser Height

[MT Pockets Producer]

I am new to the forum and new to vacuum systems. I have read many threads on here with great appreciation of all the information that is shared. We have pieced together a homemade releaser and cheap 2.5 cfm pump that will be pulling on about 100 taps through a 3/4 inch main. There is enough elevation to get 2 percent slope to the tank on gravity but the inlet to the releaser would be about two feet higher than the tank. Would this be a concern drawing the sap up two feet at the releaser? It seems similar to a one pipe ladder that I see mentioned in threads. Two feet seems insignificant considering we tested this set up pulling water 3 to 4 feet up into the releaser at 24 inches of vacuum. I'm probably over thinking this but only want to set up once. Freezing of the line is not really a concern as we will have a y and some valves in place to switch to gravity when shut down in order to catch any run that happens before we fire things up in the morning. We will be running off a small generator and the work thing sometimes gets in the way of being in the woods at the right times.

[markct]

It will work, but not as well as if it went in. Your making a big vac restriction and using vac to lift sap. I have gone so far as to excavate areas down to get a tank in and avoid having a sap ladder at the tank

[brookledge]

You could have a small tub/tank that the releaser drops into then a small sump pump/ submersable pump on a float to pump into your storage tank. Sinc you will have a generator there it could run off that. It will not use much amperage
Keith

[BRL]

Any pictures of your homemade releaser?

[BreezyHill]

10761

MT you are on the right track. In the pic, look at the right side of the glass manifold system. There is a 15" 1.5" diameter ladder to bring a mainline up to the manifold. This line is already at 1% slope so less is not an option. I will be lowering the mainline connection to remove the two pooling locations of sap in the pic. I tried all year to find a 18" length of Pyrex but no luck. So I have to add on another stall tee.

This was a remodeling of the sugar house and I had to see what would happen Earlier in the season this line just went up to the manifold. BAD BAD BAD...there is about 200 taps on this line and even on the "good days" it was just not flowing right and I was running at 28+". So I changed the manifold around and added this little ladder. She flowed like crazy with that ladder. There is enough tree gases to make it work just fine and to clear the ladder when the lines freeze I just spin the red plug to open it and clear the line.

When the sap pools like this you have poor vac transfer. That little 15" rise was actually causing a 125 foot long pool in the mainline. 15"/ 1%. In a big ladder a pool of 5', drops vac readings a few inches.

Simple fix. install a tee to the line to go straight up to the releaser and the valve on the dead end of the tee. When vac is off open the valve for gravity flow. A Y is bad because the sap will slip around the bubbles of gas/air rather than lift on top of the sap. This is just like adding a whip to a ladder...gasses go up and the sap stays at the bottom. These are used to get vac past a ladder. They do remove the natural tree gases and mean you now have to inject more prior to the ladder but some people like them.

I do it differently and y in my dry line to the side/bottom of the mainline. This is to pull sap up a dry line ladder and a little air if it comes. After this ladder the sap in the dry line stays all the way back to the dry line manifold. Vac readings went back to 28+" and the dry line has a little sap in it during peak flows. The dry line is the long glass pipe in the back of the pic and comes to the top right corner of the pic. From there it goes outside to a 3" pvc manifold that has 3 1" lines connect at this time.

Post a pic of your releaser as there may be a way to get the inlet lower on the unit and reduce the height of the ladder...Size matters.

Ben

[MT Pockets Producer]

1077110772

I have attached a couple of pics of the releaser. The inlet is about 21 inches high and could be brought down a bit to make up for some of the difference if need be. This is a piece of 10 inch plastic pipe that is used for municipal water systems. It is 1 1/4 inch thick ,which we (Dad, Brother and I) thought was overkill, but it made it quite handy to work with because we could insert fasteners solidly without penetrating through the material. It worked very nicely when it came to sealing the ends. We used a router on a jig with a V shaped bit to make a groove for a gasket to sit in. The design credit has to be given to jrgagne99 from a post in 2012 where he shared his plans for this releaser. We made a couple of minor adjustments but pretty much followed his plan. It works very well, we darn near wore it out in the shop watching it cycle like a bunch of kids.:D The inlet is a 1 inch pipe with swing valve and there is a 1 1/2 inch swing valve on the bottom. Our calculations indicate that we are getting about 6 gallons per dump. Our purpose for making it as big as we did was we felt the fewer dump cycles the less lost vacuum we would have. I guess we would have to weigh the issue of lost vacuum with a shorter unit cycling more often VS the inefficiency of pulling sap up a short ladder. In reference to Breezy's post, I kind of felt the T was probably a better option. Something told me a sweep of any sort would not be as efficient as pulling straight up. If using this short ladder, would it be ok to use the same size pipe as the main or should it be a little bigger, or does it not matter?

PS: I will try to figure out how to post a link to a video of the releaser in action.