It was down to 15 last night.\u00a0 Colder then expected.\u00a0 The day broke sunny but became cloudy by late afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 A little cooler today: only up to 38.\u00a0 About 200 miles south around Chicago a snowstorm is forecast to drop 6-9 inches of snow.\u00a0 We will miss that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Had help today so we were able to get out 200 taps.\u00a0 We did three batches this morning of 50, 30 and 40 taps.\u00a0 After lunch we washed more buckets and then did 80 more taps.\u00a0 Total now should be 400 taps.\u00a0 We were back in the house by 4:30 PM.\u00a0 And no buckets to wash tonight!<\/p>\n
We are waiting for piece of equipment to arrive.\u00a0 One of our biggest constraints is firewood.\u00a0\u00a0 We burn between 10 and 12 cords of wood a year.\u00a0 Making up the wood takes time that we don’t have.\u00a0 So we are investing in a Reverse Osmosis machine (R\/O).\u00a0\u00a0 The R\/O takes in fresh sap and pumps it under pressure through a fine membrane that separates the sugar solution from the water.\u00a0 The larger sugar molecules do not pass through the membrane so we end up with a concentrated sugar solution and distilled water.\u00a0 In a lot of R\/O applications the water is the end product people want and the concentrate is the waste.\u00a0 With maple syrup its the opposite:\u00a0 we want the sugar concentrate and the water is the waste.\u00a0 Although we have uses for the water for cleaning and even drinking as the “waste” water is potable.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
It takes about 42 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup at 2% sugar.\u00a0\u00a0 The R\/O can concentrate to 7% sugar which reduces the ratio to 12 gallons of sap concentrate to make one gallon of syrup.\u00a0 About 30 gallons of water are removed before the sap ever goes into the evaporator.\u00a0 That is 30 gallons of water that do not need to boil away.\u00a0 And with less boiling we use less wood.\u00a0\u00a0 Our hope is to reduce the wood burned to around three cords.\u00a0 That would mean a full wood shed would last for four years rather than one year.<\/p>\n
But we are still waiting for the R\/O to arrive.\u00a0 We ordered from a company in Quebec. (Quebec\u00a0 makes lots of maple syrup.)\u00a0 We ordered the R\/O in the beginning of October 2011.\u00a0 Last we heard it shipped February 15,\u00a0 but has not arrived yet.\u00a0 That is disappointing and frustrating because the R\/O is a large part of our strategy for making maple syrup in the future.<\/p>\n
As the season goes on we will revisit the R\/O topic to cover when it arrives, gets setup,\u00a0 and as we learn to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was down to 15 last night.\u00a0 Colder then expected.\u00a0 The day broke sunny but became cloudy by late afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 A little cooler today: only up to 38.\u00a0 About 200 miles south around Chicago a snowstorm is forecast to drop 6-9 inches of snow.\u00a0 We will miss that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Had help today so we were able […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-season-95"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}