Cleaning pan with vinegar -- heat it up?

[Andy VT]

Time to clean my pan!
I think I'll try a vinegar/water mix.
Do you recommend heating it? If so, to a boil? Shy of a boil?

[DRoseum]

White distilled vinegar and permeate (or water). I heat to a boil and let sit for days...weeks...then scrub (soft brush on sides mostly), drain, rinse, wipe. Done.

[nhdog]

let it sit for days or weeks ? it is an acid. do you use regular 5% or cleaning vinegar of 10% ? and what ratio do you use ?

[DRoseum]

Regular 5% but heavily diluted by the permeate. I mostly fill pan to top with permeate and then dump in a half gallon or so across both pans. Gets all the niter and scale off and makes it nice and shiny again.

[Andy VT]

Well, here's what I ended up doing.
My pan is a plain flat 2x3, if that helps with context at all. Certainly simplifies things.
Also, I only use it to get to 40 brix or so, and my propane heat source is pretty wimpy, so it was not in bad shape at all.
But anyway, I had a gallon of distilled vinegar, so I poured that into a bucket with 2 gallons of the hottest water I could get out of the sink.
I gave the pan a good water rinse, and then poured the vinegar mixture in last night.
It was just enough to cover the whole pan bottom.
It sat overnight.
In the morning, I tipped it so all the liquid went to one side and covered most of that side. Everything on the bottom wiped right off.
I left it on that side for an hour or so, then tipped it the other way and that side wiped off nice.
I did all 4 sides this way... soaking all 4 sides for a while by tipping the pan.
I admit I ended up using the rough side of a scotchbrite non-scratch sponge on the sides rather than soak longer.
My pan is most definitely NOT mirror finish, so I thought that couldn't hurt, and it didn't.
This got a few stubborn spots off.
Then I sprayed it out and it looks great.
So, I didn't end up heating it other than the hot tap water I had put in the mixture.

After watching this discussion, I appreciate the days or weeks idea, but after reading the serious warnings here:
https://www.smokylakemaple.com/knowledge-base/how-do-i-care-for-my-pans-at-the-end-of-the-season/
I figure, why not just see how long the vinegar NEEDS to stay in there, and then get it out and rinse it out when it has done what it needs to do?

Thanks for the help everyone, as always!

Now to hit the underside with something.....

[Aaron Stack]

I used the 50/50 water and vinegar method as well. Give it a good cleaning before adding the mixture then bring it up to a slight boil and let it sit for a month. Copious rinsing when done and its back to being sparkly.

I should say a month "or so". It's been sitting since March 19th and I wont get over there to drain and rinse until next Sunday. I checked in on it a week or two ago and it was already clean and shiny so you could probably keep an eye on it and cut to three weeks easily enough.

[Andy VT]

With my hotel pans, I'm now experimenting with using the 50/50 vinegar mix on the bottom (outside) of the pan as well.
Since hotel pans stack into each other, it is possible to place a pan into a pan with the vinegar mix, soaking the inside bottom of the one and the outside bottom of the other. I'll report back!
Maybe it'll just eat my pans, we'll see.
If it does work, I can imagine ways it could be done with a real sap pan as well, though maybe not worth the trouble. I think you'd have to throw together a sort of wooden (plywood) pan just bigger than the sap pan, lined with plastic, and set the pan in it.
Probably not worth the trouble... the underside doesn't have to be THAT clean.

[maple flats]

For years I used 5% white vinegar straight, (I'll explain shortly). I drained the syrup pan but did not squeegee the pan or dry it, then I rinsed with permeate and let it drain. Then I added 1 gal of white vinegar, so it was diluted only by the permeate residue that hadn't drained out. Then I heated it from underneath using a weed burner torch only until it appeared to begin to have steam, but it really was only 90-110F. Then I let it set for 30-60 minutes while I did other things in the sugarhouse. Then I used a long handled cleaning pad, (like the 3M green scrub pads). If everything didn't flake off, I heated again. This was in a 3x3 syrup pan. In the flues pan I only used permeate and ran it thru my pan washer (a 3x5 pan with 6 spinning spray arms), and it ran to drain, always spraying fresh clean permeate. The flues pan washer was used every 3-4 boils throughout the season and always after the season I had a 250 RO and a 1000 gal permeate tank. Cleaning the RO used 200-400 gal, the rest was used to clean the flues pan.