Today was mostly sunny, but cold.\u00a0 Low of 20 overnight.\u00a0 Up to only 35 this afternoon.\u00a0 Took a long time to warm up today.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
We worked on setting up the storage tanks and evaporator this morning.\u00a0 The tanks were easy.\u00a0 They are stainless steel and just need a rinse.\u00a0 The stainless steel evaporator pans are heavy.\u00a0 Fortunately we had help.\u00a0 Moving them solo is quite the task.\u00a0 We did run into problems with our pipes from the storage tanks to the evaporator.\u00a0\u00a0 We did not check them carefully.\u00a0 Turns out lady bugs used them for home over the summer and blocked the pipes.\u00a0 The sap flow into the evaporator was very restricted and would have caused problems.\u00a0\u00a0 We had to take down the pipes and flush them out.\u00a0 The second time they were fine with a normal sap flow.<\/p>\n
The smoke stack on the evaporator is getting bad.\u00a0 We think we can patch it for this season, but it will need to be replaced for next season.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The sap in the collecting tank did not freeze.\u00a0 It takes sustained cold for several days to freeze 200 gallons of liquid. <\/p>\n
Everything was ready by 3:30 PM to start fire under the evaporator.\u00a0\u00a0 And by 3:55 PM we had the first boil in the evaporator.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The sap tested at 2 Brix, 2% sugar.\u00a0 That is normal.\u00a0 At 2% sugar it takes 42 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.<\/p>\n
We boiled for two hours tonight.\u00a0 We will finish tomorrow. It takes around 10 hours to boil down 200 gallons of sap.\u00a0 Another reason for the R\/O.\u00a0 With the R\/O we should cut the boiling time for 200 gallons to around\u00a0 three hours.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
There is a good change we will have syrup tomorrow.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The weather is forecast to be around 40, windy and partly cloudy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was mostly sunny, but cold.\u00a0 Low of 20 overnight.\u00a0 Up to only 35 this afternoon.\u00a0 Took a long time to warm up today.\u00a0 We worked on setting up the storage tanks and evaporator this morning.\u00a0 The tanks were easy.\u00a0 They are stainless steel and just need a rinse.\u00a0 The stainless steel evaporator pans are […]<\/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-284","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\/284","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=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}