Still another oil barrel arch. :)

[Cjadamec]

Is your tubing exposed or insulated and covered?

Funny you should ask that. I boil outside in the wind so I covered my coil in a leftover piece of 1" thick ceramic wool insulation. The outside is wrapped in aluminum foil tape to keep the fibers contained. It's held up surprisingly well.

You can see in the photo I have a wye fitting on the discharge of the pump. One side goes to the coil the other passes through a valve and back to the barrel. On the top of the coil is another valve. By adjusting both valves I can keep the coil pressurised at the same time controlling the flow rate into the pan.

It takes a little bit of babysitting to keep an eye on your flow rate but I've learned to judge how's it's doing by the sound of the pump. I think this weekend I'm going to plumb in a pressure gauge on the pump outlet to make it easy to set the valves.

[woodguyrob]

Nice set up. 13 GPH is up there. I'm boiling tomorrow outside for the first time using a similar preheater only using gravity. A 5 gallon bucket on a ladder. I have about 23 ft. (i think) of similar size copper tubing. Based on another build I saw here in MT I put a second sleeve over the stack before the copper tubing ...to prevent scorching the lines. Like you, ceramic blanket and then covered with sheet metal. We'll see how she does.


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[Cjadamec]

You should get the sap plenty warm with that setup. The insulation blanket makes a huge difference in the temperature coming out of your preheater.

Remember in these coil coil style pre heaters pressure is your friend. It prevents vapor locking and scorching.

[woodguyrob]

Good to know. I'll make sure there's plenty of height and sap in the bucket.

[For_the_kids]

Cjadamec, I see your sap enters the bottom of the loop and sprials up the chimney, is there reason for this? In my mind, I planned to have the sap enter the top and then spiral down. As long as its under pressure from the pump mayby it doesn't matter but I'm curious if you have a good reason, or if thats just the way you did it? Also, from your photo, it looks like I can see the remainder of supper being made on a cast iron skillet. I wondered if I might be able to remove my warming pan and place a cast iron griddle there to keep it fun for the kids while they help.

[For_the_kids]

One more question, my stack is a 7-in chimney, should I leave it as 7-in or reduce it down to 6-in for this rig?

[Cjadamec]

So my thinking to pumping into the bottom of the coil is to avoid fighting any air bubbles in the copper tube. The pump pushes any air right up and out the top. When operating the coil at low flow rates I feel like it's better to work with any air/steam that might be in the tube rather than fight against it.

Never tried plumbing it from the top down so the above is all just theory on my part but I know it works well as plumbed.

I would stay 7" stack. I'm not sure what the exact math is for figuring out what size stack you need. I went with an 8" stack because I didn't want any stack restrictions for the amount of heat I was aiming to make. Again I haven't tried anything else on my rig so I can't really compare it to anything else.

You have a good eye for cast iron skillets. I was pressed for time to both boil and make dinner for the family. I had the bright idea to use the open space behind my pan to do both things at the same time without running in and out of the house. with the cast iron pan it worked great and saved a lot of walking.

[For_the_kids]

So just to update on my oil barrel arch I built. Today was my first full day boil with it. I averaged 18 GPH. I used all dry pine firing every 6:45. I fed the 2x4 pan with sap that was heated to 155 degrees. I am stoked with it's performance. Pun intended. There are a few changes I want to make to help speed it up some yet but I think I'm pretty much maxed out. I started with 196 gallons sap and stopped with 7 gallons sweet. I'll finish on propane after it settles out for a week or so.

[Mead Maple]

That is fantastic. 33 degree sap slows things a bit haha!


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