Equipment in the new Sugarhouse
Expanding from 125 taps to 3200 taps between the 2019 and 2020 seasons was a big step, and required big equipment too!
Here’s a few pictures of our old set up. I called it “Maple University”. Super fun and we learned a ton about making great syrup……Going hard we could make about 1/2 gallon of syrup per hour of boiling. That’s with the boys loading firewood every 5-7 mins (and Laura holding my beer ;)
Tractor shed / Sugarhouse. A beautiful March day boiling during the 2019 season! We live for these days.
Our new evaporator is over 20ft long and has 4 ft wide X 14 ft long pans. Evaporating over 200 gallons of concentrated sap an hour, we can now make about 30 gallons of syrup per hour! With this evaporator we should be able to handle over 10,000 taps, our plan for the future.
Thanks Jake B and Bob’s Alignment in Naples! With their help and rollback truck, we carefully unloaded it off the 18 wheeler from Quebec, and gently tilted it into our sugar house.
It sounds crazy, but this huge machine is actually easier to run than our old 2 ft X 6 ft rig!
Here’s the Reverse Osmosis (RO) machine. It processes 1200 gallons of sap an hour, taking out around 80% of the water before we boil it. We can boil in 1 hour what would take us 5-6 hrs without it. It’s an enormous energy saver. The RO lives in its own very insulated room so it won’t freeze. Of our new equipment, I was the most intimidated by this guy having never run one. After a lot of worrying and figuring, I found it is actually pretty easy to operate.
