End of season

[Bill'sSugarShack]

How do you go about boiling down the last of whats in your pan at end of the season?

What do you use to clean your equipment?

[maple flats]

At the end, I drain the back pan and fill it with water. I then add the drained concentrate to the front pan manually as I boil. When that is too low I finish in my canner or on one or both of my turkey friers. By then I always have B or darker.

[brookledge]

I do it like maple flats does it. Takes a little time but in my case when I drained my flue pan today i drew off about 40-45 gal and it was 5% so it will equal a couple of gallons.

Keith

[PerryW]

By the time i quit, I'm usually making lower-value commercial, so I just run until I'm out of sap; let things cool off then dump the back pan and finish off the front pan on the stove.

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

I ran the level down in my evaporator lower and chased the sweet out of the flue pan with aprox 40 gallons of condensate off of the preheater from the prior days boiling and then ran the syrup pan down to less than 1/2" and drained and finished in my finisher. I tasted what was left in the flue pan and it had a syrup color, but basically had no sweet taste at all.

[peacemaker]

i have a ? has anyone ever turned there flue pans over and did a acid wash on the bottom

[PerryW]

i have a ? has anyone ever turned there flue pans over and did a acid wash on the bottom

Nope. I just run the flue brush through them and call it good. I would think it would be difficult anyway because the acid needs to soak and you couldn't really fill them up with acid solution. Also, Pan acid is designed to remove Nitre, which is a type of calcium deposit like scale. The bottoms of your flues are just soot. You also have to be careful to completely rinse all surfaces the the acid has touched with water w/ baking soda then rinse again with fresh water.