OK
So I had to learn all this by trial and error over the past 4 years of tapping with tubing and buckets and much highly valued input from this website.
In my experience individual 5 gallon buckets with short tubing into a sealed collection pail are the most effective way to collect sap UNLESS you have a substantial amount of slope in your grove such that you have gravity on your side and or produce natural vacuum and/or you have a pump/vacuum on your lines. However even with good slope alone in your grove ( No pump ) I think you are better off production wise with individual buckets at each tap. If however you are using 3/16" tubing your slope alone may and for many tappers does produce better then individual buckets as natural vacuum is achieved by them. I have not worked with 3/16" tubing so can't speak for it.
If you took a two foot section of 5/16" tube and tried to blow air through it with your mouth you would do pretty well, if you took a 500 foot roll of 5/16" tubing and tried to blow air through it with your mouth you would do pretty poorly. If we had to hide from somebody underwater using a three foot section of 5/16 tube to breath through we might be able to do it for a while and live. If we had to breath through a 500' stretch of the same tubing we would die ... pretty quickly.
Why??? well just think about it.
Something has to move for something to flow. We suffer that problem EVERYWHERE, whether it be in a traffic jam or electricity flowing down the power lines.
Or most unfortunately of all sap flowing down our lines.
Sap suffers from a lot of the same kind of difficulty when it runs through tubing. Not as much as air because of its mass and inertia, but the obstacles are similar in nature.
So the more tubing that sap has to flow through ( compiled with all the T fittings that by unfortunate design also reduce flow ) the less sap you are going to get unless you make up for it with one of two ways or both ways ...
1) Gravity or 2) Pump/vacuum
If you don't want to use these or can't then as mentioned in the previous post you should use a larger main line with runs ( I would say 5 or less taps on 5/16 into the larger line ) The less taps you have on each connection to the larger mainline the better off you will be. Restrictions will mount even with 5 taps on level ground. And even on a slope. I GUARANTEE IT TO ALL! The larger mainline will give more room for the sap to flow freely and get it to where you want it. You will effectively be closer to where you would be with each tap on a drop to a TIGHTLY SEALED individual bucket which it my experience has proven to be the best producer of sap in situations where natural vacuum can not be obtained and/or powered vacuum is not an option.
In my experience, the individual buckets on 3 foot drops to tightly sealed 5 gallon pales with CV taps also seem to last every single bit as long as those on long runs of gravity tubing.
Food rated Lids that tightly seal on most 5 gallon pales are available at Walmart for $1.17 each.
I don't make any money on any of this stuff, but at least I am learning a lot.
If you think it's easy to make good money in maple syrup .... then your obviously good at stealing somebody's Maple Syrup.
Favorite Tree: Sugar Maple
Most Hated Animal: Sap Sucker
Most Loved Animal: Devon Rex Cat
Favorite Kingpin: Bruce Bascom
40 Sugar Maple Taps ... 23 in CT and 17 in NY .... 29 on gravity tubing and 11 on 5G buckets ... 2019 Totals 508 gallons of sap, 7 boils, 11.4 gallons of syrup.
1 Girlfriend that gives away all my syrup to her friends.