It was down to 15 last night.  Colder then expected.  The day broke sunny but became cloudy by late afternoon.   A little cooler today: only up to 38.  About 200 miles south around Chicago a snowstorm is forecast to drop 6-9 inches of snow.  We will miss that.   

Had help today so we were able to get out 200 taps.  We did three batches this morning of 50, 30 and 40 taps.  After lunch we washed more buckets and then did 80 more taps.  Total now should be 400 taps.  We were back in the house by 4:30 PM.  And no buckets to wash tonight!

We are waiting for piece of equipment to arrive.  One of our biggest constraints is firewood.   We burn between 10 and 12 cords of wood a year.  Making up the wood takes time that we don’t have.  So we are investing in a Reverse Osmosis machine (R/O).   The R/O takes in fresh sap and pumps it under pressure through a fine membrane that separates the sugar solution from the water.  The larger sugar molecules do not pass through the membrane so we end up with a concentrated sugar solution and distilled water.  In a lot of R/O applications the water is the end product people want and the concentrate is the waste.  With maple syrup its the opposite:  we want the sugar concentrate and the water is the waste.  Although we have uses for the water for cleaning and even drinking as the “waste” water is potable. 

It takes about 42 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup at 2% sugar.   The R/O can concentrate to 7% sugar which reduces the ratio to 12 gallons of sap concentrate to make one gallon of syrup.  About 30 gallons of water are removed before the sap ever goes into the evaporator.  That is 30 gallons of water that do not need to boil away.  And with less boiling we use less wood.   Our hope is to reduce the wood burned to around three cords.  That would mean a full wood shed would last for four years rather than one year.

But we are still waiting for the R/O to arrive.  We ordered from a company in Quebec. (Quebec  makes lots of maple syrup.)  We ordered the R/O in the beginning of October 2011.  Last we heard it shipped February 15,  but has not arrived yet.  That is disappointing and frustrating because the R/O is a large part of our strategy for making maple syrup in the future.

As the season goes on we will revisit the R/O topic to cover when it arrives, gets setup,  and as we learn to use it.