Red Roof Maples 2018

[Russell Lampron]

I wasn't able to boil last night due to a prior commitment. I had 900 gallons at the sugar house after the last gathering at 4:00. At that time I had to leave 100 gallons in the woods and the sap was still running good. I started my RO at 9:00 last night to do a first pass and will be going down shortly to start the 2nd pass and empty my gathering tank.

After that I'll be heading to the woods to bring up whats down there. The ice is breaking up on the haul road making it hard to get down there with the tractor. Some of the spots where I'm breaking through are deep enough so that the front tires on the tractor want to go under, not over the edge of the ice to come up out of the hole. I hope that I've broken through enough so that I can get down and back without a problem this morning.

[Greyfox]

Hi Russ,

Glad to hear the new arch is working well for you. I've updated a few things on my set-up as well. I took the trees at the top of the bush and switched them out to 3/16" gravity. I ran the line down to a new collection point at the edge of the pond, so by my guess i have an average of about 25' of vertical drop. I just tapped these in yesterday, with the help of my daughter who came up to visit for the weekend. There was just enough of the run left to fill the lines. It ran for an hour or so, and i managed to get up to 7" of Hg before the freeze-up. I'll be interested to see what vacuum I can draw when the run takes off. If this goes well, I'll switch the other side of the high bush to 3/16" as well.
I'll try to stop-by when I get a chance to, maybe next weekend. Good luck with your season; it seems like you're off to a good start.

Doc

[Dill]

We have serious mud here. And this snow isn't going to help it much.

[Russell Lampron]

It's good to hear from you Doc. From what I've seen and read about it you should like it.

Alden my father always says that you've got to have mud for the sap to run.

[red maples]

I love the Glenlivet fired operator!!! thats pretty funny doc.

I keep hearing about the 3/16" line need to see if can fins a side by side comparison on the amount of sap. I am sure they have it by now.

[Russell Lampron]

Wow! I'm really liking this new arch. I sweetened 1075 gallons of sap down to 155 gallons of concentrate and commenced to boil. I lit the evaporator at 5:15 and turned off the blower at 7:37 when I ran out of sap. I made 16 gallons of amber syrup, ran it through the filter press and called it a night at 8:30. That figures out to be somewhere in the vicinity of 65 gph on a 2x6! With my old arch it would have taken me close to 4 hours to do that and I thought that was pretty good.

[Greyfox]

Russ, glad to hear the new arch rocks. It's always gratifying when we spend a bunch of money and it pays off.

Brad, you probably know of this website, but just in case you might not here's a link to the UVM Proctor Maple Research Center. I find it a great resource for technical information of the science of maple production. There's an article specifically about the theory and practical side of 3/16" vacuum systems, which is what prompted me to take the plunge. It looks like this week should tell the tale of it's benefits. I now have about half my bush on 3/16", and I'm going to use my existing 5/16" setup for the other half, so I hope to have some hard data of how they perform side by side. I'll share the results as the season plays out.

http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc/?Page=publications.html

Doc

[Russell Lampron]

It looks like it is going to be a banner sap day here today. I already have the RO doing it's thing to the 525 gallons that I collected yesterday. I'm anxious to see how many gallons of syrup I can draw off in an hour tonight. Sunday's almost 8 was a record that I want to beat.

[Dill]

It got pretty cold here last night. Low 20s have to say the forecast looks perfect, got to love this time of year.

[Russell Lampron]

Richard came up yesterday and found the vacuum at 21". He spent the afternoon fixing vacuum leaks and got us back up to 24.5". Most of the leaks were squirrel chews but he did find two hollow trees that he removed from the system.

Yesterday's run was a little disappointing at 475 gallons but we did have 1000 gallons to boil with the sap that we got Monday. It's really fun boiling with an evaporator that will make some syrup in a hurry. We made 15 gallons in an hour and 45 minutes which would have taken at least 3 hours with the old arch. We're averaging 8 gallons of syrup an hour now when we used to get 5. I'm not boiling tonight so I finished February with 47.5 gallons of syrup made which is 1.5 gallons less than last year.

It wasn't supposed to freeze last night but it did. The vacuum was pulling in slush at 6:30 last evening and it was 30* at 10:00 last night. I'm looking at 27* on the house thermometer right now. It should run good today but I said that yesterday. I'm prepared for whatever we get.
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