bad timing

[maple flats]

With the beginning of my maple season, it seems everything is happening at a real bad time. Just this week, plugged drain at home kitchen sink, my snake would not clear it, plumber charged $216, but his powered rotary snake did the trick. This was the first time ever at this house for a plugged drain. Then the starter on my truck failed. 7.3L Diesel, tow to garage, almost $400 later, truck starts good. Now the shift linkage in my steering column broke (same truck). Will open column tomorrow the assess problem. I hope parts are readily available, I don't think my wife would allow me to load a 275 gal cage tote on the roof of the Prius to haul sap. The only "good" part is that even though it seems the sap should be running, I ran both vacuum pumps the last 3 days but got almost nothing so I have no sap to haul. The next 2 days will be too cold for sap to flow, but from Tuesday on for several days it should start at any time. Today we got to 37 degrees but even with 22" vacuum the best I could get was less that 6-8 gal sap.

[Flat Lander Sugaring]

waitong for pump for new ro, motor threw rod in new sap gathering truck (vortec 4.8) never made a sound until the oil filter was sheared off. and the biggest thing NO SAP!!!

[Wanabe1972]

Wow and i thought i had problems. I was late getting going this year and everything has been fighting me. I finally got the new motor on my vacuum pump today and fired up to find leaks. Pump decided to spit the belt off and drop down (it is a hanging motor design) and grind into the side frame of the pump. I replaced the belt and pulley and had 23" of vacuum at the pump with the valve to the releaser off. Turn on the valve on and down to 7" at the releaser. Walked the lines and found two taps that were pushed out of their holes. Wait a minute these trees have no holes drilled in them. Finally got all the holes drilled and vacumm is up to 17" in the woods so i will work on that later. Meanwhile this is 4 hours later and the releaser dumped once and was have full again. 200 plus taps 4 hours on vacuum on a 37 degree day= 4 gallons of sap Holy Crap.

[cpmaple]

Must be the week from H*ll got up yesterday morning to no water. changed out the press switch still nothing. Pulled the pump out of the well this am with help of two friends 500' down to find a broken wire at the pump. Ran to the store got new connectors and heat shrink back up and running. Plus side ran out in the middle of pulling the pump from the well to find the sap dripping. started pump up not much more sap went back at 600pm and 100gal in the tank and still running strong. going in a few to turn pump off first boil of the year for me on sunday cant wait.

[Russell Lampron]

I thought that I had it bad when I got up Wednesday morning with a head cold. I was awakened by a screaming circulator pump in my heating system. While I was drinking my morning coffee my wife strips the bed and tells me that the mattress is leaking, it's a water bed. So off to work I go only to find that there isn't much on the schedule and that I should have just called in sick. All of this after being up until 1 a.m. making syrup. I got all of my problems fixed for the price of the new circulator pump and a little medication.

The sap started running again yesterday. I turned the vacuum on at noon and the releaser dumped for the first time at 3 p.m.. My releaser holds 25 gallons so the flow was pretty slow for 700 taps. I went back down to the tank at 6 p.m. to find 100 gallons of sap in the tank and it was coming in pretty good. The releaser had just dumped so I walked some lines and waited for it to dump again. 50 minutes later it did just that. I don't know how much more sap I got before everything froze up. I will be heading down when it gets light out to find out.

[cpmaple]

Sounding like this past week was a curse on all of us. But like everyone else things ended on a positive note for once.

[maple flats]

I'm still waiting for my "positive note". High today forecast at 20F. How much would a climate controlled dome cost to cover 25 acres?