Adding more taps but how to move the sap

[Roads End]

HI folks...
Im looking for any suggestions as how to move sap up hill. I have 40 acres to tap and am trying to expand. this year i ran about 40 taps near the house and made a small amount of syrup on propane. I have started welding up a new 275 barrel arce extended to take 6feet of pan. Unfortunately the house and power and road only access the front of the property and from there the land falls almost 200 feet on the way to the rear line, and of course that were the best trees are. Other then cutting a new 3000 foot road get a tractor back there to pick up from a dump tank I thing im stuck. Anyone able to offer a solution for another low budget operation?

Thanks

[KenWP]

Carry it in 5 gallon buckets up the hill like I do. Can you not just cut a trail through the bush.

[benchmark]

Cant you put your collection tank at the bottom and pump it up the hill with a gas water pump?

[Grade "A"]

That would be what I would do, small gas power pump.

[Thompson's Tree Farm]

If the height of the hill is 200 ft, it will be difficult to pump. Most pumps can only pump to about 100+- feet. You would need a submersible well pump or a jet style pump I think. I'm sure there are others on here that would know/understand this better than me. I know that distance is not a problem but height is.

[KenWP]

Well if you want to pump it you can do it in stages also. Pump it up the hill as far as one pump will do it and then pump it the rest of the way. I have pumped water 6 miles that way to fill lagoons from a river. Course they were tractor driven pumps.

[StewieSugar]

I am in a similar situation, and I am interested in what advice folks have.

My farthest tap is 150 feet vertically down and 1500 horizontally over from my evaporator. I had a dozer cut a trail into the side of the hill (officially a "bluff" by Minnesota standards) that I can walk up/down, but it's too steep for my tractor when there's snow on the ground.

I put everything in 5 gallon jugs. They have small lids that seal, are square in shape, and sit well in the bottom of my kids' snow sled. When the snow is heavy in the early part of the year, I put two jugs on a sled, put on my snow shoes, and hike up-and-down the hill. It can be a lot of work, but the sap runs that early in the year are small, so it's not too bad.

When the weather warms up and the snow is mostly gone, I use the same jugs but put them on the back of my quad. I have a Bobcat 2200, which is like a JD Gator with a large bed in the back and 4-wheel drive. I can run 16 jugs (80 gallons) of sap up some pretty steep slopes when the snow is light (under 4-6 inches).

This year, I had 23 taps. If I can improve my evaporator this year to get better throughput, I'm hoping to get 50 to 75 taps next year. I'll probably still be lugging jugs around, mostly because I haven't figured out a better system for getting the sap up the hill.

I like the idea of a gas-powered pump, but I'm wondering how effective it would be. If I'm pumping just 10-20 gallons, will the pump run dry before the 1000+ feet of hose gets filled with sap? Also, in the early part of the year, how can you avoid the pump and hose from freezing? I can elevate the hose when going up the slope, but there's about 500 feet across an open field where the hose would be on the ground; is that a problem?

[KenWP]

Would not be worth while to pump 20 gallons as the pipe would hold more then that and you have to let it drain back so it does not freeze. You need several hundred gallons to make it worth while pumping and every time you would have some left over from the pipeline draining back.

[Grade "A"]

Thinking back to some firefighting classes about pump operations, you lose .433 psi (we round it to 1/2 lb.) for every foot of elevation you go up. So if you have to pump 200ft in elevation it will take 86.6 psi just to overcome gravity. This means that if you had 100psi at the bottom you would have 13.4psi at the 200' elevation mark. There will be some friction loss also, this will change the gpm you can get through the pipe. Bigger pipe less friction loss. Hoped this helped

[danno]

Not that you need more equiptment down there at the bottom of your hill, but what if you put a check valve in your line and added a nozzle for compressed air. That way, when you are done pumping, throw some compressed air into the line to blow the rest of your sap to your gathering tank at the top of the hill.

Or use the compressed air while you are pumping sap to move the sap up quicker. You could get by with a smaller pump this way as well. Take a look at the threads concerning using compressors/water to clean lines at the end of the year. Same theory. I can move water from my garden hose up about 300' vertical, along 3500' main line this way.

[Russell Lampron]

I pump my sap up a 1" pipe that is 900 feet long. The elevation change is between 35 and 50 feet. The pipe alone holds 40 gallons of sap. I use a Honda WX10 1" pump it and it takes about 15 minutes per 100 gallons. I have the good fortune of having a closed road that goes by my tank so that I can have the pipe drain back into a tank on a trailer behind my 4 wheeler. I have my pipe supported on wire just like my mainlines so that it all drains back when I am done pumping.

[Roads End]

So what im hearing is that I may as well give up as the amount of sap at least for the next few years (till sugar bush grows more) makes pumping impracticle as i would need 2500+/- feet of hose and some where between 4 and 6 pump stations to make the 300foot lift and a generator to power them. Sound like it would be cheaper for me to rent a dozer for a week and spend my summer vacation cutting in a road to the back of the property.

[markY]

I pump 1100 feet and 90 ft in rise through a 3/4 inch line with a 1 1/2 hp goulds hms 5 stage pump with a yamaha 4500 generator. 475 gallons per hr and I drain back about 30 gallons each day. I tried everything over the years and this works the best for me. I put 2 gallons of gas in generator every other day.

2200 taps

[paul]

build the sugar house down below. run the sap from around the house down to the sugar house.

[PerryW]

It would be nice to find a reliable high-pressure low-volume pump that would chug away pumping sap through a 5/16" line from the collection tank up to the sugar house (for smaller operations).

A low-volume pump would have a much lower electrical current requirement and you could send power down a piece of 12-2 UF for long distances without overloading it.

[Brent]

You're right about one thing, it sure ain't cheap getting all that free sap turned into syrup is it?