cleaning evaporato

What if I poured a gal or 2 of vinegar and filled the evaporator with water and fired it up. Would that help clean it?

Yes. And at the end of the season you can leave your last sweet or even sap in the pans for a few weeks, it will turn to vinegar and soak into the niter and leave your pans sparkling like new with very little scrubbing. There are dozens of posts on here about that, some including myself leave the pans soaking in maple vinegar for a month or two after the season.

I do like bmbmkr and do the sap soak, If you catch it before it molds or get's too funky you can filter off some of the Maple Vinegar for salad dressings and cooking. You'll need to pasteurize it though. I just heat it to 180 for a few minutes to stabilize it. If it goes too far the mother consumes the whole pan and then spoils. Doesn't make any difference for cleaning but ruins vinegar. I also made vinegar independent of the evaporator....actually works better for vingegar. I save some mother in the fridge from each year.

Thank you both for the reply.

Wow....when I tried that pan cleaning method, nothing I saw in the evaporator made me think 'I'll put that on my salad' :) :)

I use chemicals now, like vinegar or milk stone remover acid, or pan cleaner from a Maple dealer. Less mold in the sugar house is better for me. Also I don't have the waiting time.
Heat is the key to get the niter loosened up.

We generally leave the fermented sap in the pans until it makes you gag when you come through the front door of the camp. I've never once been tempted to eat it! I've seen the contents get so ropey that it would barely drain out a 1" pipe. It kills a large patch of grass on the hill beside the camp where we've drained the contents.

We drained and washed our pans last weekend after letting them sit for 7 weeks. We had more tartar than ever on the flues and they came clean with a little pressure washer time. The syrup pan is sparkling!

I think your first idea would dilute the vinegar too much. Cutting the vinegar with too much water is not a good idea. I use straight vinegar, but many get good results adding 1 or 2, maybe 3 gal water and get good results. Reducing the strength more than that I'd think would dilute it too much.

if you want any vinegar, you got to keep an eye on it. Heat and time just makes it spoil, as your culture dies. By the time most check their pans it's a slimy goo. It doesn't always make vinegar. When it does the vinegar lies under the mother or goo. Light and heat affect this process, I cover my pan. Like I said I do my vinegar in 2 gallon glass jugs when I want true usable vinegar, but I have seen it come off the pan. A sugar content of about 10% is best for vinegar, too sweet and it totally ferments and then rots.

We use the acid from the maple dealer. Our pans were sitting empty and dirty until 2 weeks ago. Filled them up with acid/water. Turned the oil burner on and waited for a boil to start. Shut it off and went back a week later and used a wash cloth to remove anything left. As mentioned, heat is key with the acid. Pans are shiny new. Shack serves as more than just a sugar house so letting sap sit isn’t an option.

We have someone near us that goes to farmers markets with the vinegar,people lap it up because it has the term “ maple” in it. Funny thing was one day an elderly outspoken lady was at his booth and declared that the vinegar was the garbage that she knew we cleaned our pans with and dumped. Really hard to keep from laughing out loud at that comment