when to collect

[maplekid]

when do you guys collect the days sap. do you wait towards the end of the day or do you get out there and collect early in the morning?

[brookledge]

Most collect at the end of the day. That way you collect what has run and it won't freeze over night. If you collect in mornings you will have to fight with ice. But it doesn't really make a difference, I think it more or less depends on your shedule and how much the sap is running and when your tanks or buckets are full.
Keith

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

Most of us work full time day jobs, so evenings unless it is the weekend is the only option.

[Fred Henderson]

We start about 2PM unless we did not get it all the day before. Which is seldom the case.

[maple flats]

When schedule permits I like collecting mid to late afternoon. After that what runs will freeze overnight and help keep the next day's sap cooler until mid afternoon again. When it runs real good I pickup mid morning too.

[Russell Lampron]

We usually start gathering around 3:00 in the afternoon if it looks like the sap is going to run the next day. If it looks like it isn't because of an extended freeze up or warm spell we start around 4:00. When my parents had a sugarhouse with no lights and a dairy farm my father and the farm hands would gather in the morning and early afternoon while my mother and grandfather would boil. You can gather at whatever time is most convenient for you.

Russ

[Valley View Sugarhouse]

I have some friends that have a farm and they collect twice a day.. they collect at 11 am after morning chores, and then boil before evening chores and then they will collect afet evening chores at 6:30 and boil again.... They also make fancy alll but the last week, week and a half of the year..

[markcasper]

In a perfect world........I think everyone would do it that way.

[ennismaple]

We tend to work in the bush early in the morning, start gathering before lunch, fire up the R.O. and once it has run for a couple of hours we fire up the evaporator. Every wagon load is 525 gallons and the R.O. processes 600 GPH so we need a couple hundred gallon head start or the evaporator will process the concentrate faster than we can bring it to camp. There's normally sap left in the bush overnight but that's not a big deal since all the tanks are covered and sheltered.

If it's running hard we start gathering early. If it's a slow day we wait until later so we can get enough to fire up the RO and the evaporator.

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

Ennis,

How big of an operation do you have??

[ennismaple]

About 4,000 taps, all but 200 or so on vacuum. We've got 5 Zero tanks in 4 different locations that we gather from using a 525 gallon white poly tank pulled behind our tractor. Once we're tapped it's a 2-man operation.

It's an awkward size to be. Too small to be a hobby but not large enough to make a significant amount of your annual income from it. My folks will likely retire before too long and selling syrup will become more of their day job.

We've just ordered tanks, a pump, releaser, mainline, tubing and fittings to start working our new bush this coming year. We expect to add about another 500 taps this winter, depending on how much time we can spent working at it. Ultimately, we'll get somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 more taps out of this new bush.

Sorry for hijacking your thread Maplekid!

[maplekid]

it ok ennis its always good to hear diferent stuff by the way what size evaporator do you run?

[PATheron]

Ennis- If you get started tapping the new bush get some pics if your able. I really get a kick out of looking at other peoples woods and lines. How long has it taken you to get to your current size and how much syrup would you say you make on an average year with that many taps?Theron

[ennismaple]

Maplekid - I really don't know what size our evaporator is. I think it's about a 5x16 but I'm not certain. The arch we've had since the sugarhouse was built in 1976 and it was used when my grandfather bought it. It has 2 uninsulated doors and we feed it 42" lengths of wood. The back pre-heater pan is about 2' long. The raised flue pan is about 9' long and was bought about 4 years ago to replace the original leaky pan. The front pan is 5'x5'. Our finishing pan is a 2'x4' that sits on a 45 gallon drum lined with fire brick. The finishing pan and the front pan are on a siphon to keep them at the same level. Sap flows into the front pan from the flue pan through a valve we have to manually adjust. With a good boiling wind we can get 175 GPH. When we're boiling 9% concentrate this can mean we have up to 15 GPH of syrup coming off the evaporator. One of my next projects is to talk the boss into replacing the evaporator once we've expanded the bush.

Theron - I do plan to take a lot of pictures when we work on setting up the new bush and will share. My great grandfather used to make syrup on the same property. We went from just over 1000 cans in the 70's to today's operation by putting in tubing over time. We use the wood we cut from a bush we intend to tap as evaporator wood the following year.

We made just over 800 gallons of syrup last year. We got hammered by the '98 Ice Storm (55% crown loss) and most of our bush was already mature so it didn't recover well. We lost a LOT of trees. A bunch of our mainlines are the original black water line that were put up about 1980. Too many sections of it are flat, undersized, not laid out very well, have tons of cut-in fittings which means it is nowhere near as efficient as it could be. I need to get a lot of the mainlines replaced, use Y's instead of T's and install some vacuum boosters where the mainlines are long to increase the syrup per tap ratio. Time & money...

[Sugarmaker]

Maple kid,
Ours is more of a hobby so I generally take a half day vacation and start gathering in the early afternoon depending on the run and the weather. We try to be done boiling by midnight.

Regards,
Chris

[PATheron]

Ennismaple- That is a lot of syrup to make in a year. There are very few people in our area that make that volume of syrup in a year, last year was a pretty bad year too. Thats terrible about the trees. I cant even imagine how bad it would feel to walk in the woods and see that. I had a bad one here and it tipped over a lot of ash but hardly messed any maple up. It was a wet year and the ash tipped right over and dominoed other ones. I was disapointed but that storm you had I think was the worst in my lifetime. You guys didnt even have power for a month or two in some areas. I understand about the time and money it is expensive to do things right. I think mine is going to come out pretty nice but im learning as i go. Like anything else your an expert after its all done. Theron

[ennismaple]

I was in my last term of university in southwestern Ontario when the Ice Storm hit. My parents were out of power for 10 days - they were the lucky ones. My mother says the first time they walked through the bush my father had tears in his eyes the whole time. We made no syrup at all in 1998 and only 38 gallons in 1999. We didn't get back to cleaning up the bush, fixing all our mainlines and replacing lateral lines in one bush until 2002. Hopefully it was a once in a lifetime thing for us!

We're a medium sized operation in our area but the largest I know of that still wood fires. The largest producer is Vernon Wheeler and family who have about 17,000 taps. They're located about 3 miles due north of us.

[PATheron]

Ennismaple- its just about bringing a tear to my eye just hearing about it. When I walk into my woods all I can think of is how long it took to grow those trees. I can only imagine how you guys felt especially when your using that woods somewhat as part of your living and at that time probobly had a substantial investment in equipment and time. Around hear it seems to be the norm to run 1000 -2000 taps. We have a few over that but not very many. Our biggest producers do not use wood. One thing that seems to be real rare is vac. Only our larger guys use it. I dont even know anyone locally that does. I think most guys just dont becouse its pretty costly too do the tubing that way and the pump and everything. Most guys around here do it for fun and some side money. What percent of the damaged Trees survived would you say and were there enough younger trees that were far enough along to mature enough to tap? Theron

[ennismaple]

We were assessed at 55% crown loss. We've probably lost 20% of those trees with the remainder in various states of recovery. We've partially offset the loss by tapping trees on the fringes of our bush and by adding new trees that have matured to tappable size.

Almost all the producers in our area run vacuum. Most use old pumps from dairy operations as they are plentiful. Any new pumps we get will be flood oil as they can run 22" Hg day and night, which the dairy pumps can't do.

If someone does the math it doesn't take long for vacuum to pay for itself. A 3HP flood oil pump with all the accessories will run about $3500. You can get a releaser for around $1100 for a total of $4,600 spent (not considering the other minor costs to get everything airtight). Let's say you're running 2000 taps on gravity and normally make around 500 gallons of syrup. On vacuum you'll typically get at least 50% more sap which will equate to another 250 gallons of syrup made. If you retail your syrup for $40/gallon: subtract $5/gallon for fuel and container costs you net $35/gallon x 250 gallons = $8,750 extra revenue in year one! Of course, there's lots of assumptions and other minor costs in what I've said about but it's obvious that converting a gravity bush to vacuum will pay for itself very quickly. It was the best thing we did on the two bushes we recently converted.

[PATheron]

Ennismaple- your saying the liquid ring design pumps work the best becouse they can run a long time without overheating, and provide high levels of vac where the farm pumps just arent designed to be operated like that. The farm pump will work for a lot less money but it isnt really designed for keeping such high vac levels for so long? Check out this website and tell me what you think. www.harrissugarbush.com .

[danno]

PAtheron - the "farm pump" that many of are using, including myself, are old dairy pumps used for milking and were manufactured to run at 15". That being said, most of us run them in the high teens, some even higher.

I've heard those that are running 23" say that they are getting more sap, but I don't know if there have been studies done comparing 23" to 18".

The old dairy pumps are certainly cheaper then a new pump, sometimes they last years sometimes they last half a season. The best way to keep the old ones running is to go through them and clean out the oil gunk before running them hard. Based upon suggestions I got on this forum, I run a box fan agaisnt the pump to keep it cool. I've run my Delaval 76 for about 4 days straight- I was nervous, but she kept spinning.

[markcasper]

danno, just was reading the latest maple digest and there was an article in there on vacuum levels vs. yield. They used 7.5 inch dia. trees and tapped something like 35 taps, all in close proximaty and on the west side. It said they ran 5-6 different levels of vacuum and one level with no vacuum. The range was 5+ something gallons per tap for no vacuum, on up to 32 gallons of sap per tap at 25 #'s of vacuum. They had 15, 18, 21, 23, and 25 #'s of vacuum. Forgot to mention that Proctor did the research.

They tapped smaller trees b/c they cut them all down and dissected them to study and see if higher levels of vacuum caused more damage to the trees. The results were negative, but the verdict is still out on whether the increased sapflow harms the tree in terms of taking too much sap. I beleieve the syudy wasn't focused on that like it was the scarring scenario.

[ennismaple]

Proctor has stated that sap yield increases linearly with vacuum - i.e. a 25% increase in vacuum (like 16" to 20") results in 25% more sap. I've always been of the opinion that if you follow proper tapping guidelines the only real stress on the tree is the wound from tapping and not how much sap we get from the tree.

[PATheron]

ennismaple- From my reading of the producers manual it seemed to me that they basically advocate the use of vac and that tapping the tree was more harmfull than the removal of the sap. Also that the more vac the more sap. you guys are all pretty much in agreement that follow proper tapping guidelines and use reasonable vac levels and we are not hurting trees any more than tapping ever has. Im using health spouts and tapping conservatively. My trees mean a lot more to me than any amount of syrup I can make so I want to be sure I dont harm them through ignorance. Thanks Theron