it's pete from cheap homesteading and it's about five o'clock on Saturday
morning and we're gonna fire up the evaporator and start boiling some sap so
let's go okay so I got the four-wheeler loaded up and we should be good to go
okay so now we're gonna get this sucker going
so eventually I'm gonna have to build doors for the front of this thing
because it's hard to get the chimney worn and you even have doors so like
mine then I block off the front just for a short while and tell the chimney
starts heating and then there you go it starts going
so now it's just finally got up to temperature and it's up and running good
and I'll give you a little bit of a tour of my Sugar Shack and the evaporator and
all that kind of stuff so basically the fire is under the front pan and I use
about four foot long pieces of wood four or five it all depends the pan sit on
two big racks the fire is under here but the smoke carries on underneath the
second pan and it preheats the second pan so your main part of the boiling happens
up here but the sap going into it is preheated so it doesn't cool down the
boiling process too too much so smoke comes underneath the second pan and then
it comes up my chimney you will probably recognize what I made my chimney out of
I am not condoning this in any way but that's what I use and I have another
chimney that is a bigger chimney that goes up past the peak and it just sits
inside there so the smoke goes up and then it goes all the way out the chimney
on the top I have a little flap that opens with little rope and I tie it on
to the wall I have a cube sitting inside my window I open the cube and the sap
runs into the pan in this pan it kind of slowly heats up preheats and I made
everything gravity so my next is lower so all I have to do well you
can't see it open up the tap to whatever level I want just a trickle or whatever
continuously feed the pan and then my finishing pan is still lower than the
next pan so I can open taps to allow sap to move to the finishing pan basically
throughout the system I find the system is really really
effective and it's even helped that since I closed in the back wall it
doesn't give a chance for the back pan to cool down too much it's really
steaming now but your main boiling happens on your front pan my pans are
three by seven two of them and one that's two by two my had a two by three
pan last year but I kind of wanted to allow more smoke up and around the pan
so I didn't plug my holes that's good I'm the main reason for that is I actually
noticed less smoky taste so I'm gonna try to get a little bit out of a happy
medium between smoky taste and suddenly not burning 2030 quart of wood just to
boil a few G's the maple syrup so it's much better so I finally got the system
pretty much the way I like it it's working great everything is running
really really well the only thing I might change in the future is make
automatic floats so I can not leave each pan to only have about two inches so you
have the optimum boiling because if you have to fill up the tank you end up
filling the pan and allow the Panda oil but if it automatically fills to keep it
at that level you would have optimum boiling like all the time and
consistently so that would speed up the process too
so that's for another year first days well I could say lots and lots of steam
fishing pan has to get a little more up to speed up we're working on it the fire
its going pretty good under the finishing and now it should start boiling soon besides my
little incident with the frozen tank we're we're doing pretty good