When to go Big

[Loon Lake Louie]

How's she goin'? I have a very small operation in central Nova Scotia. Right now I boil on a single pan over a propane burner and make about 3 liters of syrup a season. I am thinking of going bigger, an was wondering on thoughts from anyone as to when it makes the most sense to switch to a wood fired evaporator. If I can up my collection to say 400 liters a season would that warrant a wood fired evaporator? Any thoughts or just comments would be interesting to see. Thanks and this is a great site for all questions and for getting great ideas for improvements!!!

[TerryEspo]

I think stay with propane even at collecting 400 liters for a season.
That only comes to 2.5 gallons of syrup for the season.

You would only have 1-2-3 good boils on a 2x3 or 1 really good boil on a 2x4 pan with wood.

Your sap would spoil before you had enough to start the pan for a boil.

Maybe you could pull off using a 2x3 pan and wood arch, not sure. Try and get your collection total raised and go wood if possible, much cheaper than propane, more fun too!!

[Loon Lake Louie]

Thanks TerryEspo. Sounds like good advice. I like the 'more fun' part!!!

[Big_Eddy]

Louie
You want to match your capacity to the size of your operation (i.e. the number of taps you have) You should plan for enough capacity to boil off in a week the maximum amount of sap you might collect in a week (not get behind), AND you don't want so much pan that you need to collect for more than a week before you have enough sap to boil.

For a very small operation like yours, I highly recommend steam table pans. The nice thing about steam table pans is that you are not forced to wait for lots of saps to be able to take your batch down to syrup. By moving concentrate forward, you only need to have enough sap to take one pan to syrup - the rest can still be boiling raw sap. (You can also lengthen your arch and add more pans when you add more trees)

So when does it make sense to move to wood?
If you take an average tree output of 1 gallon on a good day and assume 5 good running days in any given week, then the MAXIMUM you would plan around is 5 gals /tree / week. I usually use 1 gallon a tree a week as a minimum number.

Then figure out how many hours a week you can / want to be boiling and size the pans from there.

For example
10 trees = 10 gals min to 50 gals max a week.
If you can only boil on weekends, then you might use a planning number of 16 hours of boiling time.

50 gals / 16 hours = 3 gph needed to keep up on a good week
10 gals / 3gph = 3 hours minimum boil on a bad week.

A typical flat pan / steam tray setup on a wood fired arch will evaporate ~ 1 gph / sq ft, so in the example above you would look for a 12"x36" setup (essentially 2 steam table pans) Double the trees, double the square footage.

You can tweak the numbers above to suit your situation.

10 trees or more, I'd look to move to wood.

See this thread from last year for a similar discussion related to flat pan sizing. The same principles apply (although with steam table trays the minimum sap needed is less of an issue)

http://mapletrader.com/community/showthread.php?24023-Evaporator-Sizing-Math&p=260736#post260736

[Loon Lake Louie]

How's she goin Big_Eddy? Great advice and lots of interesting stuff in your response to my post. Gives me lots to think about.
I really appreciate the response to my postings and this will help me decided whether or not to expand.
Thanks all!!!!

[Sugarmaker]

Ed is on the money! what ever you do work the math. Make it work for you so your not killing yourself and still having fun.
Balance the amount of taps with the systems to make it into syrup every time it runs. If you do that you will make the best syrup and have the most fun!
Regards,
Chris

[Cedar Eater]

My plan for this year was to make 5 gallons (20 liters) of syrup. For that I would need around 200 gallons (800 liters) of sap. Last year I made 3 gallons and was able to do okay with a peak of 3 gallons per hour of evaporation. I managed that with one steam table pan and two 16 quart stock pots. One stock pot received all the cold sap and was the preheater for the other stock pot and the steam table pan. So going into this year, my thought was to set my peak sap evaporation per hour rate at my syrup goal. Since I wanted five gallons of syrup, I wanted to be able to boil away 5 gallons of liquid per hour. I'm retired, so I can devote a lot of time to this hobby at this time of year, but I didn't want to be spending it watching sap boil or cleaning soot from pans.

I saw Fyreaway's electric eVaporator and fell in love with the concept of using electricity. There is nothing simpler and more fun to use for evaporating than my two electric evaporators. No soot, no fire, no flameouts due to high winds, etc. I can walk away for a whole hour most of the time during a boil. I can shut it down by flipping a switch and start it back up just as easily. I documented both projects in the homemade equipment forum and there are links to those in my sig lines below. But I understand that electricity can be pretty expensive in Canada, so propane, natural gas, or fuel oil will be your only options for getting anything near the convenience of Volts X Amps.