Originally Posted by
bmead
My suggestion would be go with the 3/4 mainline and 5/16 tubing. with as little drop as your explaining 3/16 would not gain much vacuum and has been shown to have major clogging issues in future years. I installed a 1500 tap woods on 3/16 and removed all of it after the second season and the yield drop i saw.
As for tubing it self i prefer leader max grip for lateral lines and leader max flex for droplines. grip is a little more than uni50 however much easier to work with and holds in the woods better imo.
Taps i would switch to 5/16 vs 7/16 for tree health, the yield difference is minimal and the tree healing is much better!
Connecting 5/16 laterals to the mainline i prefer H20 saddles.
Mainline should have 2% or greater pitch, it can be run with less however it has to be absolutely perfect. if 2% is tough to get in your woods i would recommend going to a 1" mainline vs a 3/4
Good way to go IMO. I would add that you should make certain that your 5/16 have a decent length of undisturbed final run into the 3/4 mainline after the last tap of say 50 feet or more, as much as you possibly can. If you have a tree or trees down near the mainline and a long 5/16 line coming down from trees up higher, then do not tee into that 5/16 line from the down low tree. It will corrupt any flow/vacuum generated in the long 5/16 line coming from the upper trees.
If you have taps near the mainline they should be individually submitted to the mainline or with no more then two or three other taps from other low trees into the mainline.
In these off the grid vacuum setups, it seems to me a 3/4 or 1 inch mainline should be appropriately named a "lateral" line as it should slope down and across the slope "laterally". And any 5/16 lines should be called "vertical" or "vacuum" lines as they should run vertical down the slope as much as they can, synergizing slope and drop into vacuum and into the "lateral" mainline where in theory it should become vacuum less, unless of course you decide to vacuum the output of the mainline with a pump.
Your vacuum generation will take place only in the long 5/16 lines into the mainline so long as it is not corrupted by any T's inn the long final run into the mainline. Of course this is contingent on a decent amount of slope in your grove.
And it raises the question to me does it make sense to "vent" the end of a mainline in this scenario??? I would say yes, but I only have experience in this scenario by generating vacuum on 5/16" lines into barrels at the bottom of a run rather then a mainline. The good thing about this is it has shown what works well and what fails as I can see directly how much each run has generated and don't need a gauge to know if I am generating vacuum or not. Although this year I plan to use a gauge to see how much more vacuum I could be generating.
And YES you can generate beneficial vacuum in 5/16 if it is set up correctly.
Do not put more then 10 taps or less then 5 on a 5/16 vacuum run at peak flow times if they are big trees.
If they are small trees go 15 to 10.
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.