Hope you all are willing to help me with this. I want to make sure that I have thought of everything and am ready for the season. A little background: I have been making small quantities of maple syrup for a while now but never more than a quart or two and by using stainless steel pots on a wood stove. Also, after 27 years of being landlocked, I have finally persuaded a neighbor to sell a right of way to me for access to my mountain property (30 acres with a mix of maple (red and sugar), hickory, poplar and oaks. This being said, I will be making much more syrup this year than in the past. I plan to have 300 taps to start with the possibility of over 800 on the property.
My property is in the gap of a mountain therefore I have nearly 300 feet of elevation drop and am facing east-northeast so I have availability for gravity flow and a lot of it with early morning sun. I have purchased 300 each of the following: leader 3/16" tees, leader 3/16" stubby spouts and 300 leader check valve spout adapters as well a 5 rolls of 800', 3/16" leader tubing. I recently build a two handed tubing tool. I also have acquired a 600 gallon stainless steel bulk tank with valve (I need to purchase an adapter going from acme fitting to 3/4" hdpe pipe) and a 250 gallon bulk tank without valve and open top. Sap will then travel via. 3/4" pipe to the evaporator that is a 26"x 6' raised flue sap pan and a 26"x 2' syrup pan on a homemade arch which is nearly complete. My plan is for the syrup to exit the evaporator and travel through a homemade Optimizer style cone filter into a stainless steel stock pot with faucet. If syrup is hot enough after filtering, I will bottle it then if not I will reheat and bottle later but store syrup in plastic food grade 5 gal. buckets.
The sugar shack is a 14'x18' timber frame building that will be assembled as soon as the cement floor is cured. The floor is scheduled to be poured next weekend and will have a floor drain centered and 3' from the front of the evaporator. The bulk tank will be in a shed beside the wood shed and the outlet is 54" higher than the floor elevation to allow for gravity flow from sap tank to sap pan.
Please don't hesitate to point anything out or ask anything. I am hoping to have everything ready and would love feedback in case I have overlooked or ignored anything.