Quote Originally Posted by DrTimPerkins View Post
The Smartrek system is running great....and very interesting to watch the temperatures throughout the woods. Easy to see when things freeze up out in various sections, but still running in others.....makes me even more convinced that shutting off the pumps (which we don't do) when it freezes is a real crap shoot at times.
I agree that shutting the pump off is a crap shoot. This morning at 1:30 my dad went to check on our Jericho bush and it was 28 at the pumphouse, with sap coming in pretty well. He thought that we had a temperature inversion going, which makes sense. I think the top of the bush is 1400' and the base is 900 or so. Anyway, he went back at 6:30 this morning and the moisture trap had tripped the pump. We think what happened is the sap turned to slush and somehow made it through the screen into the submersible pumps and wouldn't pump, filling the releaser and triggering the trap. Because when he got there this morning the pumps were working again, just the vacuum pump was off. Luckily we have our woods real tight so we still were at 20" when he showed up. Anyone else in that area see an inversion last night? I don't know much about inversions but it was interesting.

Besides that the weekend went well, we passed the 1000 gallon mark for our bush in Westford. I want to know what our production is in Jericho but the guy trucking and boiling the sap needs to total his numbers from his 3 trucks first. We must be over 200,000 gallons of sap over there by now.

Got our vacuum up high again yesterday, so went up to Fletcher and Fairfield yesterday and checked out Jr Sloan's place for a while instead of doing my homework and drove around and looked at all the tubing and sugarhouses. About half of the sugarhouses I saw were boiling. Saw a lot of deer in fields too. It was really cool to talk to Jr and some of his crew, and see that he has highschool girls and guys working his filter press and barrels. It's just nice to see young people working in sugaring, as well as both genders. Where i grew up, most people worked at the grocery store or movie theater and so its nice to see a place where people are working in sugarhouses. Also, anyone have a guess how many taps are boiled off of in Fairfield and Fletcher? It must be more than 700,000 taps between those two towns alone.

Looks like good weather for the next week.