New Build Evaporators

[RUSTYBUCKET]

Do manufacturers generally keep a stock of evaporators (2x6) or is it build to order? If they have to build does anyone know the average amount of time between placing the order and delivery?


Russ

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

Russ,

About all of the companies keep 2x6's in stock. They can usually have them ready for you if it is made to order in as little as 30 days or possibly less if it is a rush order. If you are thinking about a 2x6, you can get a 2x8 for around $ 500 more and pick up close to 10 more gph.

Just a thought and keep us posted with whatever you decide. :D :D :D

[michaelh05478]

Brandon's right! But you need to know if you want raised flue or drop flue. Oil or wood? Galv or all Stainless...Hoods or no hood...left side feed or right side feed........Hope I didn't mess up your head......Most of us went thru this before we decided what we wanted, and Brandon was right about going a little bigger, might as well do it now instead of later.....Id say you should do well on prices now for in stock rigs.....Welcome to the maple trader and good luck.......Mike

[FMWARREN]

I was at Grimms last week and they had a room full of 2x6s and were making more.I was picking up replacement main line .did a walk through, alot of new shinny stuff. FMW

[RUSTYBUCKET]

Thanks for all the information. Since selling my hobby evaporator to my neighbor, we've been doing this together for awhile, the plan was to move up to a 2x6. One factor for moving to a bigger unit was to increase output. I'm fortunate to have (or maybe its had??) a local farmer who sells my syrup at the street markets in NYC. We were talking the other day and due to a number of reasons, he may cash in his chips after this seasons harvest.

So now I'm going to rethink my plans. Do I continue to make syrup with my neighbor, using HIS evaporator or should I stay the course and get a 2x6. What kind of "markets" are you guys using to sell syrup or is it mostly roadside stand and word of mouth? Its not meant to be a commerical venture but I'd at least like to cover the cost of the evaporator. Speaking of cost, I wonder what effect steel prices has had on the cost of evaporators. :(


Russ

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

Russ,

As far as selling syrup, word of mouth is great and good quality syrup will sell itself. I am shooting for 75 to 100 gallon and plan on selling 95% of it by word of mouth. Like the saying goes, "A good product will sell itself"! :D :D :D I had 40 gallon to sell this year and it was gone in 2 months or less. :D

As far as steel prices, they have gone up and now are back down some. It really has not affected the price of evaporators much this year as the prices were set before the steel took its increase. The profit margin is lower for the evaporator companies, but that's the way it goes!

Brandon

Over the past ten years I've heard the evaporator companies , especially in the spring say 'order now the price of stainless is going up', and it never did , well it finally has gone up, alot, and sheetmetal , angle iron , tubing, welding wire, welding gas, electrodes, cutting tips,fuel surcharges on everthing shipped and recieved, everything has gone up. It used to be quanity got you a price break when buying , not anymore. I hate to agree with Brandon, (my yankee pride) but the 'big guys' will be passing the increase on when the next catalog season comes , they'll have to , to stay in business.

[Russ]

After firing 5x16 and 3x8 evaporators together for the past several years, we decided to make an investment in a single, larger system. We sold the smaller unit. The tin arch on the large evporator was shot, so we salvaged the 8' flue pan and 5' wavy-bottom front pan (it also had a 3' copper syrup pan), alonf with the cast doors and chimney apron and had a guy we know here in Wisconsin build us a customized evaporator. He is a professional metal worker and also makes syrup; he has some very interesting ideas that we wanted to incorporate.

We added a 3' intermediate pan and a 2' syrup pan (with a spare for swapping out to clean out the niter). Instead of a blower for the firebox, he suggested a 6" pipe going into the second section of 20" chimney at an upwards angle, which we will force air into in order to create a venturi effect that will pull the heat/air from the front through the arch and up the chimney. This should eliminate the need to shut down the blower when firing up in order to avoid heat and sparks from coming back at us. The firebox should be able to accommodate 4' long wood pieces; the doors are wide enough to swallow whole pallets.

We also had him add a piggyback over the 8' flue pan. This also requires a fan unit to aerate the sap in the pan to promote steam off (since the sap in the piggyback will not reach boiling temp). He also nestled 72' of 1.5" stainless steel piping in the underbelly of the piggyback as a preheater. Our elevated tank should be high enough to provide sufficient head pressure to force the sap through the preheater and up into the piggyback float box.

The arch has a stainless steel skin and is boxed in from front to back with 5 leveling feet on each side, but he used galvanized sheet metal for the floor of the arch. We used 1" of 8# Kaowool banket to insulate the firebox sides and floor, with a layer of firebrick over the top of that.

He has an Amish guy make the steamhoods; we are waiting for those before the test firing. We are hoping this unit will do 400+ gph once its up to full heat and draw-off. We won't know until next March.

[DougM]

WOW!

[WF MASON]

Sounds like quite a system , the only part I think 'might' be a problem is the air injected in the stack and not in the firebox also. I fired a woodchip fired steam boiler for a number of years and that had a stack blower that would start a minute before the firebox blower would start and run a minute after the firebox blower would shutoff to help with the burn in the firebox.
I think a stack blower will just suck the heat out of your evaporator , without helping the burn in the firebox.I believe you need that turbulence in the firebox for max burn. I certainly could be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time.Please let us know how it works, maybe the rest of us are missing something.

[Russ]

We are prepared for this contingency... we kept the forced air unit from the old evaporator and have made provisions to plumb it in to the new one. This time we'll use a variable speed switch to control the volume of air going in. We're still hoping that the stack blower will do the job.

[Maple Hill Sugarhouse]

post edited

[Russ]

Looks like our first test boil will be this next weekend. Our evaporator builder is bringing the rest of the parts (mostly steamhoods). Found out that he is bringing another syrup maker and someone from the Wis. Maple Syrup Producers Association, who want to document and videotape the operation of the evaporator. I would have liked to have tweaked it first, but it should be interesting. We'll be taking 700+ gallons of water to run through it. We're planning on burning pallets.

I'll try to remember to take some pix and post them afterwards.

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

Might want to take a video of it, I sure would pay to have a copy of it and I am sure there might be more interest in seeing the awesome setup you have! :D

Good luck! :D :D

[Russ]

I'll grab the camcorder also when I go up this weekend.

[Russ]

Well, we found out Friday that our test boil had to be postponed until maybe next weekend. Our evaporator builder did not hear back from the Amish steamhood builder, so here we wait again. Meanwhile, I've been buying some electrical parts to automate the pumping of sap up to the elevated tank. We use a a 300 gallon caged poly-vinyl tank for the overhead; much safer and easier to clean than the 300 gallon SS dairy bulk tank we previously had on the stand. I bought a normally-closed float switch, which will be wired to the pump and a flashing red light inside the shed so we know when the pump is on. I'll also have a bypass switch in case we need to manually pump sap into the overhead tank.

Got more info from the user of the gravity releaser; but I'll post the update in the existing thread.

[Russ]

OK, it's been a long weekend and I don't have the pictures developed yet, but i'll post a summary of yesterday's test boil. I was too busy with firing, looking at different things, and taking pictures to keep notes, so this is from memory.

It took a little longer than we thought to get the rest of the parts put together. Two of the steam hoods had to have their chimney holes cut and mounts screwed on; we needed to do some grinding to get the pans to align better and fit not quite as tightly as they were, I had to run some temporary wiring and wire a variable speed switch on the forced air fan, my brother had to crawl inside the piggyback to connect 17 aerator tubes to the air manifold, etc.... We got to adding water around 1:30PM and fired it up as soon as all the pans were covered. I fired with mostly hardwood pallets; it didn't take long for the fires of hell to get steam rising off the front pans. A few clamped joints had minor leaks, which we took care of quickly. We ran a cheap leafblower for the aerators; it worked great on the low speed setting, but was noisy as expected. It is mounted to the outside of the building in a wooden enclosure hung on the wall; we're going to try to insulate the enclosure to cut down on the noise.

The induced draft on the chimney was our biggest disappointment; it helped initially to draw the heat and smoke back and up the chimney, but I needed to add some forced air in the firebox to get the fire really going. We have already identified several improvements for that, namely a bigger pulley on the motor driving the squirrel cage fan and a different ducting system to eliminate some 90' corners.

The peak reading on the pre-heater was 180'F as I recall, but that was at a point when we didn't have a lot of flow while we waited for the back pans to get boiling. There were too many people making too many adjustments to floats and different things, so we didn't get to tweak it for optimized operations. Once the flue pan float and piggyback float were flowing, the preheater took the water from 38'F ambient to 160'. Coming off the piggyback and into the flue pan, the temp dropped to 140'; I think this happened for a couple of reasons. If you read my description of how this is designed; the preheater is sandwiched in the plenum between the flue pan and the piggyback. It may be absorbing a lot of the heat before the steam gets to the bottom side of the piggyback flues. Secondly, the aerators are injecting cold outside air into the water. Lastly, we were running the water level in the piggyback very low since with sap you don't have to worry about scorching as the temp never gets high enough for the sugar to burn.

Our remedies for real cooking will be to try running the piggyback a little deeper and to add a fixed or variable damper to regulate to velocity of the steam through the plenum... if we can slow it down a little, it may do a better job of heating the piggyback. I told my brothers that a drop in temp in the piggyback isn't going to bother me if that's what is going to happen; the pre-heater's job is to heat the sap; the piggyback's job is to get rid of some of the water content (there was definitely steam coming off the piggyback flues). I'd like to get the pre-heater temp to stay at 180' with steady-state flow; the preheater is over 70' of 1.5" pipe.

In talking to my bothers today, I said that at our first cooking, we'll need to get up to a full boil, make one change and wait 10-15 minutes to see the result. We all know that every cooking day can be different than the previous, so like any new tool, we'll need to play with it for a while to see how it behaves. Overall, we are pleased with the results and are looking forward to running the real stuff through. The day started at 28' outside; by the time we got all the flue pan drained completely around 5PM, it was down to 9'.

I hope to post a few picture either tomorrow or Tuesday. Wish I had a digital camera.

[Russ]

I don't want to be monopolizing this discussion, but the pictures came back today and I put 6 of them in my personal album. If you mouse over the pictures, the captions explain the picture. I have a few more pictures I can post, but these are the probably the best in terms of showing the innards of the new toy.

Of course, there's the picture of my claustrophobic brother stuck inside the steamhood of the piggyback, mounting all those aerators. That's what happens when you're the smallest. I'll put that one in the next rotation.

Feel free to comment or ask questions.

[syrupmaker]

Russ....WARNING WILL ROGERS ! ! ! Be careful on changing pulley size on a blower with a squirrel cage. Most are desighned to run at certain rpm.
Overspeeding it will cause it to self destruct and cause a lot of long faces. :cry: :oops: :x Mapleman might be able to offer more insight on this subject also. It's been awhile since i have done Hvac rebuilds so it's a little fuzzy.

Rick

[JohnM]

Thanks for the pictures Russ.

Good luck with tuning and great season in 05.