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If my tanks are to be trusted to hold what they claim I just boiled off 90 gallons in 5 hours! Lit the fire at 10:00 AM and put the lid on at 3:00 PM! The new rig is a looong way from my rickety old widow maker block arc. Relaxing? Not so much. Exciting? Oh HECK yeah! What a rush! Ted
Sheesh tbear! 18 gal an hour?!!!? What kind of hot rod rig do you get into?!!!!!?!!
Threw in a quick 50 today. All running pretty hard.
Hey IowaSap! Purchased a Smoky Lake 2x5 flat (batch) pan and Corsair arch with a blower for AUF. Also put up a shack so no more wind to deal with. That thing roars, firing every 5 minutes with small diameter (split last year for my old setup) pine and spruce that's bone dry. Can't wait for my grandson to test ride it! Neither can he! Finished off a bit over 4 gallons of Golden today, then rested up. Boil on! Ted
Put out 200 taps last Saturday and Sunday (Feb 24th & 25th). Must have not been cold enough at nights this week as we didn't get much sap yet. We had 22° last night so hopefully will run well today. Still have time to have a good season. Headed for the Tri-State Forestry Conference in Sinsinawa, WI next Saturday (March 10th). Is anyone else gong?
Jim
Good Morning All. Great to see Iowa on here! Not much happening for me but hoping the next coupe days get things rolling.
We scorched the pan after runing 110 / 120 gallons of sap into it (batch boil). It was strange, it appears that there was a form of "gradient" being created as there were 3 different scorched areas and the sap level was good. The 2 front corners of the pan and the back right hand corner as you face the arch were the victim's. We flooded the pan, let things cool down, pulled cleaned/scraped and scotch brited the pan and wrre back up and running 2 hours later. Thank God there were 4 of us there to work on it! If I'd have been alone I'd still be scrubbing on it. A razor worked the best. Little if any warpage to the pan. Of course it happened 5 minutes before a 4H group showed up, but the show went on with a good result regardless, gotta love the forgiving nature of young people. Ted
The niter is terrible now. I'm draining and cleaning after every boil and it's still bad. It also changes the temperature of the syrup, very hard to be consistent.
We are confused as to why we are getting such low sap flow on our 160 taps on a north-facing hill. We've had perfect day/nights for sap flow, 20 at night and high 40s and sunny during the day but the trees on the hill are almost dry. Dan Potter in Garnavillo said it's because the trees have icy feet. Anyway, we've done a few boils just to clear out the tank and get sap on the table but we are scratching our heads about the sap flow. Thankfully, we're supposed to get 5 in of snow today so maybe it just means the season is going to be later. Jim in Castalia, I think we are in the same boat, climate wise.
Collected about 150 gallons of sap Saturday. Boiled it down yesterday and will probably get about 3 to 4 gallons of syrup when we finish it with a propane pan tomorrow. Not much sap will run today, but maybe this coming weekend. Jim