Spring Harvest 2023

[Amber Gold]

Spent the end of last week pushing hard to get ready for maple weekend. Although Sunday was cold/windy, the weather was great for the weekend. I’ll take cold/windy over rain/snow…people still show up. From Wednesday through Friday evening, we collected ~1200 gal of sap, which is enough to run the RO all day and make syrup. Saturday’s run wasn’t much, so we had to pump raw sap directly to the head tank to have enough to boil for the day. Since the process changed, we completely flooded the flue pan and had to drain it down to run the RO. Overall, very happy with the weekend. Everything basically went well.

Sap flow last week/weekend wasn’t what I thought it should be. Temps seemed like they were perfect for sugaring, but sap flow as 0.5-0.75 gpt…not sure what gives. I thought mid-20’s/mid-40’s was perfect sugaring weather…guess not. Hopefully, things turn around and gets better.

Production wise, we’re about halfway through the season. We’re 12,000+ gal, and I figure an average year should be 20,000 to 25,000 gal. If sap flow picks up, and we can go into April, we should do alright this season, even considering the February sap we missed.

[Amber Gold]

Sap flow picked up yesterday. Collected ~0.75gpt. SSC down to 1.3%.

I relocated one of my cameras, so I can remotely monitor the tank level. The display on the ultrasonic tank level sensor is unreadable, so useless to me.

[jrgagne99]

1.3% already... oof. Good luck with the rest of the season!

[Amber Gold]

Thanks JR. The biggest downside to 1.3% sap is trucking it. The RO machine doesn't care what it is. So long as the sap runs, and we're making good syrup, we'll keep going.

Hauled most of a truckload home yesterday. Trees are just running OK. Vac. crept up to 27". No freeze last night, and a rain event coming in, so maybe that'll get the trees running better??

[Amber Gold]

Sap flow is still about 0.75gpt. Trees just aren't running well. Boiled off about 1500 gal over the previous two days and made about 20 gal of syrup. We're well into a dark now. Grade dropped a lot since the end of last week.

I got to the woods yesterday not long after the releaser pump stopped kicking on. When the electrodes get a film on them, they don't work properly. Just a quick scrub and all good. A good thing that came out of it is I found a couple vac. leaks in the pump shed I didn't know about.

However, I got a surprise back at the RO room. I turned the RO back on and noticed sparks coming out of the plug. Shut it off and found the plug was melted because it was overdrawing on one leg. My guess it was a bad connection within the plug. Rewired the RO directly to the breaker to get me by for the night, and it ran fine. I'm going to rewire it tomorrow using a 60-amp non-fusible disconnect...hard connections, so no plug to worry about.

Yesterday was full of surpises (one almost really bad), but things worked out in the end.

[red maples]

I had an issue with my RO as well. when I first tried to start it up this year it would click and had a few sparks out of the plug as well. so I quickly stopped it. then noticed that there was a pretty good not corrosion but just a film or tarnish of the copper plugs wasn't making a good connection so got a little fine sandpaper and polished it up and it was good to go!!!

[Amber Gold]

I'm wondering if I had something similar going on. I'd recommend swapping out the plug setup for a 60-amp A/C disconnect. They're $18 from Lowes and then you have a terminal connection and eliminate a failure point. If you need to move the RO beyond the extension cord, it only takes a few minutes to disconnect from the box.

After fixing the electrical issue, not I'm dealing with a low pressure issue. Before filter is ~40psi, after filter is ~18psi, so the RO is shutting off because of low pressure. I'm not sure why there's 20psi of pressure drop, and that's with no filter in the housing. Still working with H2O to figure this out

Sap flow still stinks (which is kinda good since the RO isn't running), but I haven't been able to process since Thursday night.

[Amber Gold]

Yesterday, I got the RO running again. Since the before filter pressure reading is fine, I connected that line to the pressure switch. I processed about 1700 gal of sap and made 20+ gal of syrup.

We're at about 16,000 gal of sap collected this season, and SSC is at 1.1%. Still shooting for 20-25k, but I doubt we'll get there with how things are running. Since the middle of last week, we've been getting about 1/3gpt, so it's taking a few days to get enough sap to boil. Temp's have been favorable, so I don't get it. I think last year was similar, and we just limped along after maple weekend until the mersh came.

[red maples]

yeah not getting much sap here either. not getting much at all I am creeping up on 8 weeks since I first started tapping. I think most of your sap is coming from your sugar maples.

[Amber Gold]

I think you're right about the sugars. My line that's mostly sugars is flowing about as much as all the other lines combined.