Rats……!
The forecasted +2 for Wednesday to Friday has changed to 0, -1, -3. No temperatures above freezing now until March 17th, but hopefully that will change. I now have 84 taps in and will put in 27 more buckets in tomorrow and that way they will be ready if the weather changes.
I collected 5 gallons of sap yesterday. 1.5 gallons in barrel 1, 2 gallons in barrel 2 and 1.5 gallons in barrel 3. Of interest is I tapped the trees for barrel 1 last, and it had the fewest number of taps feeding it. What it does have is the steepest, uninterrupted final slope (the crux) and it seems that it really is the engine of the vacuum. Small sample cycle though. Once the sap starts to flow again, I will walk the lines to see how the line flows along the entire length of it. The good news is they all ran yesterday.
There was zero sap in the nine buckets, which I still find curious.
If the weather forecast had held for Wednesday to Friday, I would have done my initial flush and test on the RO and would have set up my evaporator to be ready to boil.
The five gallons I initially poured out of the barrels into pails to measure, I poured back into the barrels to freeze. I tested the sugar content with my un calibrated refractometer and it showed 2%. I need to get some distilled water to calibrate it.
2022 - 5 pan block arch - 109 taps, 73 on 3/16 lines, 36 on drops into 5 gallon pails.
930 gallons boiled, 109 L (28.8 gals) of delicious syrup made.
DYI Vacuum Filter
2023 - 170 taps, mostly on lines, 1153 gallons boiled, 130 L (34.34 gals) of delicious syrup made, on a 2x4 divided pan and base stack, 8” pipe, on a block arch that boiled at a rate of 13 gallons per hour.
2024 - made 48 L, December to March, primarily over two fire bowls.