DanielW
Well-known Member
- Location
- Haliburton, Ontario
It's getting to be sap season, and here's my latest project. I should confess: Most of this was built/tested last year. This year is just a little more tweakification & improvement.
We've always done syrup at our Northern Farm (Youtube link below is a video of my grandfather doing it). Unfortunately with a newborn at home, a busy work schedule, and an hour commute each way, I just don't have the time to run either of our wood-fired evaporators. Nor do I have enough time to deal with enough taps required to get the amount of sap required to effectively use and cover either of our larger evaporators. So I've scaled back significantly. Instead of several hundred buckets to collect & boil (at our peak we were in the thousands, and we never ran pipeline - because the best part of the whole operation is collecting), I'll do only fifty-ish taps right along the road, where I can collect in the back of my truck on the way home each night. And more significantly: To save the extensive time required to fire up a wood-fired arch, get everything up to temperature, boil for a few hours, then begin the long/intensive shut-down procedure required with a wood-fired unit, this spring we're going to live at my little house in town where I'm on natural gas.
I built this arch to accommodate a 2X6 pan setup. We have the large old 3' x 14' setup shown in the video, but I also have a newer 2X6 raised flue pan setup on a smaller wood-fired arch. I built the natural gas arch to accept that same 2X6 pan setup. But for now, with such a small number of trees, I won't even use the flued pans. I have this cheapo 2X4 flat pan on the back, and I've made a removable steel cap for the front pan, with a removable trivet in the middle the right size for my large stock pot to sit in. I'll reduce in the flat pan and finish in the stock pot.
Small, but not a bad setup: I can handle up to 50 taps on this setup. And if I ever want more, I can put the flued pan from my other evaporator on the same arch and easily handle up to 150 (could do 400+ if I ever decided to run RO - but that would be cheating).
The burners are H-pattern stainless fire-pit burners from Vevor that I chose because they span nearly the full width. Had to get creative with the orifice sizing and air entrainment, because fire pit burners are designed to have a tall, inefficient, yellow flame. I want a short, blue, efficient flame. If I were on propane, I could use homemade funnel-style venturis. But I tried them and with NG being delivered at such low pressure (even compared to propane after a regulator), it didn't have enough pressure/flow to draw enough air through the venturi effectively. So I made a forced-air setup to induce air into the mix by a little centrifugal blower from Amazon.
Pretty small-scale compared to our previous years, and I miss the hours spent walking around the bush collecting. But at least it keeps me boiling in some capacity.
Our old setup:
We've always done syrup at our Northern Farm (Youtube link below is a video of my grandfather doing it). Unfortunately with a newborn at home, a busy work schedule, and an hour commute each way, I just don't have the time to run either of our wood-fired evaporators. Nor do I have enough time to deal with enough taps required to get the amount of sap required to effectively use and cover either of our larger evaporators. So I've scaled back significantly. Instead of several hundred buckets to collect & boil (at our peak we were in the thousands, and we never ran pipeline - because the best part of the whole operation is collecting), I'll do only fifty-ish taps right along the road, where I can collect in the back of my truck on the way home each night. And more significantly: To save the extensive time required to fire up a wood-fired arch, get everything up to temperature, boil for a few hours, then begin the long/intensive shut-down procedure required with a wood-fired unit, this spring we're going to live at my little house in town where I'm on natural gas.
I built this arch to accommodate a 2X6 pan setup. We have the large old 3' x 14' setup shown in the video, but I also have a newer 2X6 raised flue pan setup on a smaller wood-fired arch. I built the natural gas arch to accept that same 2X6 pan setup. But for now, with such a small number of trees, I won't even use the flued pans. I have this cheapo 2X4 flat pan on the back, and I've made a removable steel cap for the front pan, with a removable trivet in the middle the right size for my large stock pot to sit in. I'll reduce in the flat pan and finish in the stock pot.
Small, but not a bad setup: I can handle up to 50 taps on this setup. And if I ever want more, I can put the flued pan from my other evaporator on the same arch and easily handle up to 150 (could do 400+ if I ever decided to run RO - but that would be cheating).
The burners are H-pattern stainless fire-pit burners from Vevor that I chose because they span nearly the full width. Had to get creative with the orifice sizing and air entrainment, because fire pit burners are designed to have a tall, inefficient, yellow flame. I want a short, blue, efficient flame. If I were on propane, I could use homemade funnel-style venturis. But I tried them and with NG being delivered at such low pressure (even compared to propane after a regulator), it didn't have enough pressure/flow to draw enough air through the venturi effectively. So I made a forced-air setup to induce air into the mix by a little centrifugal blower from Amazon.
Pretty small-scale compared to our previous years, and I miss the hours spent walking around the bush collecting. But at least it keeps me boiling in some capacity.
Our old setup:
