Quote Originally Posted by mainebackswoodssyrup View Post
... but it does save time of not having to replace taps in the 3rd year. Not really a big savings for us but for a large operation like his, it could be very beneficial.
Exactly...every operation is different in many ways. For some, the time spent making and changing drops (and bringing the old drops out of the woods) is minimal, for others it is huge. Same with costs of materials and cost of time and cost of sanitizing lines and rinsing or letting sap run on the ground to flush. All those have different costs and different benefits and net profits. Gets complicated really fast.

In order to factor those in, we constructed a spreadsheet tool producers can use to calculate various options for their own operation. https://mapleresearch.org/pub/spouteconomics/ The results are based upon a bunch of research studies (mostly UVM and Cornell) over many years.

A description of average results can be found at: https://mapleresearch.org/pub/1018sanitation-2/ , but it is worth checking out the spreadsheet if you like to play around with different scenarios.