Kyle:

I have a 2x6 that I use outside my garage, but I did not want to leave it there all year, so I mounted it on an old 4 x 8 trailer that I had. I installed jacks on the four corners of the trailer for lifting, stabilizing and leveling. I set it up for the season and did not move it, but I do cover the pan at night. This arrangement worked well for me, but when I did move it into the barn after the season, I had a number of fire brick fall out. So, consider leveling it and leaving it for the season, although you may do a better fire brick job or smoother transportation than I did.

You can leave sap in it overnight during the 3-5 day runs if you have boiled the sap to sterilize it. Then you can give the pan a good cleaning in between runs. A lot of the larger producers are emptying and cleaning more frequently, but they are boiling more sap and often boiling concentrated sap so they get more niter build-up.

At the end of the day, you want to put enough sap in it that it does not boil empty. But you also want to make sure that any sap that you do put in it gets boiled for 15 minutes? to kill the microbes and sterilize the sap. I would generally boil with about an inch of sap, but at the end of the day, I would let the sap get up to 2 inches deep. I would stop feeding wood into the about 30 minutes before I figured I would run out of sap. Then the sap would keep boiling on the coals for about an 1/2 hour after I finished adding it. By morning, I was back down to about a 1 inch sap depth.