This April, as usual, we cleaned our evaporator after the season ended. Processing nearly a half million gallons of sap will leave a little calcium in the rig! We alternate between food grade phosphoric acid and sodium hydroxide, along with many water rinses. One morning, after leaving the pans to soak overnight, we were surprised to wake up to an empty flue pan! Somehow during the season a hole developed in the bottom of the pan. It must have bridged with minerals during the season, but once we cleaned everything off it became exposed and leaked into the fire box. We’re still not sure how a hole like the one in the picture develops, but fortunately we were able to get some help from Firth Maple Products welding it back up. We installed four come alongs to lift the steam pan, then TIG welded the hole shut. Now that the Christmas candy rush is over we’ll finish cleaning both the inside and outside, and weather permitting we’ll have syrup boiling again within the next month.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the crew at Nova Maple Syrup!

Our brand new Bambu Labs X1C 3D printer arrived this week! Last winter we made some custom candy molds with a very simple printer, but this new one has way more capabilities. It can print larger objects, more accurately, faster, and with a variety of materials. It’s even capable of switching material/colors mid-print, carbon-fiber strengthened plastics included. We have lots of cool ideas to try out for the maple farm, we’ll post more later.

We finished installing and testing our new sap filter for the 2025 season! The system will process 60 gallons of sap per minute, allowing us to immediately filter any sap that comes into our tanks before sending it to the reverse osmosis. This should lead to higher quality syrup, especially later in the year when it gets warm, and savings in disposable RO filters. We’ll also eliminate our bag filters coming into the tank, which never really did a good enough job and required frequent changes/washings.

.