Countinous Flow Pan Vs. Flat pan

[ancientwave]

Hey Everyone,

1st post here, could you please provide your expertise?

Short story.. I am going from a homemade rig to a Smoklylake 2x3 rig with a blower. I am bumping from 20 to 35 taps next year. We are property that has 100-120 sugar maples. That being said, I don't know if I should buy a flat pan or a continuous pan. It sounds like the continuous pan has a slight advantage in production but drawing off and finishing every pint sounds like a pain, compared to heating all day and doing it in a large batch at the end of the night like what I'm used too.
I would love to hear your thoughts.

My goal is to get 1 gallon per day of syrup.

Also how many taps in your experience would you need to get a gallon of day?

Thanks

JC

[psparr]

Go continuous, you can still batch boil on it.

As far as taps for a gallon a day, it depends on your trees. If their on buckets or gravity tubing, then I would tap at least 60. That way on decent run days you should get your gallon. If you have the slope, then go 3/16. You'll have more sap than you'll know what to do with. You can always dump sap.

[Tater]

It depends on how/when you boil. I know Minnesota weather is a bit different than VA weather, but we found out the hard way we can't leave sweet in the pan for more than 3 or 4 days. It can take 75+ gallons to sweeten a continuous flow flat pan, so you will have 1.5-2 gallons of syrup in the pan just to draw off a pint. Also, the syrup that you draw off periodically will get cold and you will have to reheat it to filter and bottle. A batch boil will allow you to filter and bottle syrup without reheating (or at least not as much).

You can batch boil on a contiuous flow, but it is somwhat more difficult to empty all the syrup from a divided pan. We were running 35 taps with sap sacks, and we decided we did like our divided pan better than an open pan. We typically waited until we had several days worth of syrup to bottle anyways.

[Cedar Eater]

Welcome to the site. You need somewhere between 30 and 100 gallons of sap per day to get a gallon of syrup per day. The number of taps it would take to get you that is somewhere between 15 and 200. I imagine you would like that range narrowed down. Knowing the sugar content of your sap and whether your trees are on gravity or vacuum are the key pieces of information that would help narrow that down.

[lpakiz]

When I batch-boiled on a 2X3 flat pan, I boiled at least 80 gallons of sap per batch, and 100 was better. You will end up with 5/8-3/4 inch of syrup (2 gallons) in the pan at the end of the boil. You will not be able to finish to syrup with any shallower depth than that. At that depth, the pan better be very, very level.

[seandicare]

if you don't want to draw off small amounts of syrup at a time, maybe you could draw it off early, before it is true syrup, then batch boil that when you collect enough to finish.

[ancientwave]

They are 35 gravity taps at the moment.

[ancientwave]

How did you store your sap, that is my next big thing. It looks like you are a similar setup that I have,