I am a new syrup hobbyist. I have a weekend place in Southern Vt. I built a sugar house this summer and bought a wood fired Leader 2 x 6 WSE evaporator. I will hang 100 buckets in a few weekends if mother nature cooperates. With luck, I can boil Fri, Sat, & Sun on two weekends. I have a few questions for you maple sages out there.

1) let's say I tap Friday morning, and collect late Friday. Do I have to boil this ~100 gallons Fri night, or can I store it and add it to the 100 I collect late Saturday and decrease the times I need to fire up the arch by one every weekend?

2) Since I have a wood burner, I'll need to slow down the fire before I run out of sap so as not to burn my pan, correct? My question is, can I leave that sap overnight and just use that as part of my sap for the next days burn or do I need to clean my pan every day (remember, I'm only evaporating 100-200 gallons a day.

3) On Sunday, after my last boil of the weekend and I have to return home in NY to go to work, again do I leave some sap in the pan until the next weekend? Or will it go bad as I expect? Or do I really need to do a water flush to at least somewhat clean to the pan since it will be sitting around another 5 days until the next weekend?

4) I know that sugar sand or niter(?) builds up and that I should reverse sides that the syrup draws off? Because of my somewhat low volume, can I avoid this hassle? It looks like with my evaporator it will be somewhat of a pain in the butt to switch sides, especially if it is full of liquid.

Thanks so much for any and all help!

100 taps
Leader 2 x6 WSE