A bit of a disappointing weekend for us. Between Thursday and Friday we got a total of 1 GPT. We ran it through and sweetened the pans enough to get runoffs for an hour and a half before shutting down. Overall it went well - RO and The Beast functioned as needed. Filtering went OK. Only thing we broke was a $1 plastic valve on the bottom of the rain barrel we use to hold the hot water that runs off the pre-heater. I'll take that for the first boil! Saturday we got an unexpected 1/2 gallon per tap at 2.3% sugar. Not enough to fire up but good to have that sitting in the tanks waiting for more sap in the middle of the week.

Loving the new vacuum pump. With all the woods in the 24" Hg range the sap still runs well right to zero and below and there is very little icing in the releasers and not much ice in the mainlines overnight.

Hating all the friggin' ice! We've got ice 6" thick at the back door of the camp and everywhere we go the tractor needs to dig to get traction so we can only bring back half loads until we get through to the ground. The sun on the ice during the day simply polishes it to a high gloss shine!