balancing sugar making with another job

[lew]

My job is the busiest during sugaring season. That's when we get all of our overtime. I agree with what others have said and won't repeat them. But what I will add is get big equipment. You don't need to be spending a lot of time boiling. Your time needs to be spent in t h e woods, that's where the money is. Once you get the sap out of the woods you want to boil it as fast as possible because you've got to get home and go to work the next day.

[doocat]

I have to agree with Lew on the big equipment. We went larger on the RO this year for just that reason. I want to spend more time in the woods (where I enjoy it the most). Don't want to have to spend time waiting on equipment (RO) to concentrate.

Craig

[ennismaple]

We have the same situation you describe. Both my brother and I have full-time jobs and young families. He's an hour from the sugar camp and I'm 3 hours away. Our employers are understanding that we will take up to 2 weeks off in March and April to boil. We'll each take 1 or 2 days of vacation per week to boil. There is generally a few days per week where there's not enough sap to fire up and then you normally get a longer freezeup at some point in the season that allows you to get some rest. We have a cousin who is retired and lives beside the sugar camp that does a lot of the heavy lifting for us - like starting and stopping vacuum pumps and gathering sap.

The key for us is having lots of extra tank storage. Between what we have in the camp and what's in the woods we have more than 2 gallons per tap of tank space. That generally allows us to boil every second day except during really heavy runs. The 3,000 gallon tank in the camp is often full when I get there in the morning. I'll fire up the RO and get it concentrating sap while we wash the front pans and get everything else ready to boil. Once I get a thousand gallons of space in the storage tank in the camp we can't collect sap fast enough and I'll slowly drop the level of that tank throughout the day until we have no more sap left in woods.

The other key is having the ability to process sap quickly because we are not boiling every day. 2 membranes allows us to process up to 1,000 gallons of sap an hour (depending on sap temperature and how hard we want to push the unit) and we can adjust the concentrate flow to match the evaporator's speed. We often have no more than 12" of sap in the concentrate tank that feeds the evaporator. It can get a little scary if you have to shut down the RO for a few minutes to change a filter!