Evaporator, RO input

[dbeitz1891]

Hi everyone,

We're looking for information from current owners on their evaporator and RO. We're moving into a high efficiency woods arch and looking at a 1,200GPH RO. We're looking at the Leader vortex, extreme 2 combo, the Lapierre force 5, turbo combo, or a Tole Inox/ MemProTec combo. Any information is greatly appreciated.

[ennismaple]

Our Force 5 is 3.5'x14' with pre-heater (10' flue pan, 4' syrup pan with 4 channels) processes just over 200 GPH of concentrate per hour. Depending on how much sap we have in front of us we'll run the RO for 3-5 hours to concentrate before firing up. With our 2 tower RO we averaged over 150 gallons of syrup per chord of wood this year. We burn mostly oak and maple with some misc other hardwoods and the occasional bit of basswood or poplar that needed to be cleaned up.

If you're still in the 1155 tap range for the foreseeable future a 1200 GPH RO would be too big unless you're holding sap for 3 or 4 days before boiling.

[dbeitz1891]

That sounds awesome. What are you taking your concentrate too? And no we are doubling in size this year and then adding again next year. Hoping to be at 3,000 or more by 2019. For that reason were trying to look ahead and buy what will fit us well in the future instead of buying for the now. Especially with a purchase of this magnitude.

[ennismaple]

We don't measure our concentrate - we set the flow to 2 GPM and whatever comes out the other end we boil. If you're a few years from needing 1200GPH of RO capacity buy an expandable unit with one tower now and the second tower in few years.

When you get your evaporator pans make sure to tell the manufacturer you plan to boil 12-14% concentrate rather than raw sap. It will affect the decisions on how much flue pan vs how much syrup pan you need to get enough colour in your syrup. We're definitely making lighter syrup since we went to the 2nd tower.

[Sunday Rock Maple]

We have a Leader HC2 and love it. When I get home from work I set the concentrate output to 4 GPM and ten minutes later start the evaporator and run until we are out of sap (usually about 3 hours). This year we averaged 1,150 gallons of sap processed per hour with 2 percent in and 8 percent out. We do sacrifice efficiency for speed but it works well for us.

[Shaun]

I boiled on a 2.5x10 force 5 this year, the evaporator is very impressive. The boil and flow off the ro were very close around 120 GPH. A little small for 3000 taps, the matching outputs worked well.