Today was mostly sunny, but cold.  Low of 20 overnight.  Up to only 35 this afternoon.  Took a long time to warm up today. 

We worked on setting up the storage tanks and evaporator this morning.  The tanks were easy.  They are stainless steel and just need a rinse.  The stainless steel evaporator pans are heavy.  Fortunately we had help.  Moving them solo is quite the task.  We did run into problems with our pipes from the storage tanks to the evaporator.   We did not check them carefully.  Turns out lady bugs used them for home over the summer and blocked the pipes.  The sap flow into the evaporator was very restricted and would have caused problems.   We had to take down the pipes and flush them out.  The second time they were fine with a normal sap flow.

The smoke stack on the evaporator is getting bad.  We think we can patch it for this season, but it will need to be replaced for next season.  

The sap in the collecting tank did not freeze.  It takes sustained cold for several days to freeze 200 gallons of liquid.

Everything was ready by 3:30 PM to start fire under the evaporator.   And by 3:55 PM we had the first boil in the evaporator.  

The sap tested at 2 Brix, 2% sugar.  That is normal.  At 2% sugar it takes 42 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

We boiled for two hours tonight.  We will finish tomorrow. It takes around 10 hours to boil down 200 gallons of sap.  Another reason for the R/O.  With the R/O we should cut the boiling time for 200 gallons to around  three hours. 

There is a good change we will have syrup tomorrow.    The weather is forecast to be around 40, windy and partly cloudy.