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Going to collect this evening and see where I’m at for the weekend.. most likely not enough as well. As for the mason jar bottling I just keep the jars hot from a quick rinse and pour the hot syrup in from a large stock pot on the stove that has a spigot. This finishing pot I don’t have set so the syrup is boiling .. more around 195F. I filter before adding to this finishing pot. 
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Mar 23, 2019 00:53
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that is a nice finishing pot, I should look into something like that. Today is sugarhouse open day in VT, so we visited operations that had 13,500 taps, 5,500 taps and 23,500 taps respectively. Ate some donuts, had some sugar-on-snow, bought a local frozen chicken. It's been a weird loving week, because the day after that great run, we hit nor'easter weather and I kid you not, I got 15-20" fresh on top of my tank. I had gone out to cover my tank with a tarp the night before; the upshot of that is that I think my Motorola x4 is under 2' of snow somewhere, and I hope it still works in 2-3 weeks when I find it. Anyway, insane snowfall or not, it looks to me like I'm in the middle of another 30-40 gallon run, so I'm boiling again. The dude with 5,500 taps pointed at his original evaporator that he still has hanging up, which was a single 2x3' pan. He said "we started there, so, watch out, or else 20 years from now you're gonna end up like me". It doesn't seem like a bad thing, the guy has the coolest truck in town (giant military cargo truck retrofitted to have a ~1000gallon reservoir on top). edit: 46 gallons exactly today, and I finished off another 7/8gal. Cabbages and Kings fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Mar 25, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 21:07
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Tim Raines IRL posted:The dude with 5,500 taps pointed at his original evaporator that he still has hanging up, which was a single 2x3' pan. He said "we started there, so, watch out, or else 20 years from now you're gonna end up like me". It doesn't seem like a bad thing, the guy has the coolest truck in town (giant military cargo truck retrofitted to have a ~1000gallon reservoir on top). I can totally see that happening.. it’s an addiction I have a realtor app on my phone and it’s pinned to Lanark, Ontario. “The maple syrup capital of Ontario”. One day I’ll quit I.T. and become a woodsman hobbit with a fair sized garden and a shitload of sugar maples.
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Mar 25, 2019 16:17
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Thrasher posted:One day I’ll quit I.T. and become a woodsman hobbit with a fair sized garden and a shitload of sugar maples. I share this vision, maybe we can conspire. That's exactly what the 13,500 tap operation down the road did, though, they are a full-season working farm. Two people with kids, doing tons of the labor themselves, it's pretty amazing.
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Mar 25, 2019 16:49
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Getting close to 200gal, I think - I got less precise because I timed things today such that I could cleave a large ice shelf off the top of the reservoir by whacking it with a length of cedar, and then tossed it out. It didn't taste sweet, so, there's some free concentration happening. I think I'm at like 160-70gal on the board I make hash marks on.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:14
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not a ton in the tank but it's absolutely gushing so I am boiling. I'm going to make every effort to zero out my tank tomorrow night, but it's NOT going to freeze tomorrow night, and I'm not going to be able to boil Friday. Hoping to do a big boil on Sat. Postess / Gath -- if I pile up some snow around the outside of my tank as best I'm able, sap should be okay for 36ish hours in 38-45 degree weather.... right? I'm just paranoid because I lost like 60gal to spoilage last year. Granted that was over like a 3-4 day period. Cabbages and Kings fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 19:03
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If there is ice in tank your cool. Even if color starts to yellow. I only ran into problems when it got above 35-40f for like several days. You can always drink a bit to see if fermentation has made it funky. 36 hours on bulk fluids takes a long time to warm. I dont deal with alot of 2% though so it could ferment twice as much at lower periods. One thing that does work well though is keeping sun out of tank if its a clear plastic tank.
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Mar 27, 2019 19:26
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Gath posted:If there is ice in tank your cool. Even if color starts to yellow. I only ran into problems when it got above 35-40f for like several days. You can always drink a bit to see if fermentation has made it funky. Cool, thanks for the info. I'm working with a stainless steel tank, and even though it's supposed to be real warm we still have well more than a foot of snow on the ground. So, I imagine I can cover it in a pile that'll last the night.
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Mar 27, 2019 19:30
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Tim Raines IRL posted:not a ton in the tank but it's absolutely gushing so I am boiling. Yeah that's not great, pile snow as best you can, maybe throw some ice blocks in it. I have that easy, I just take some ice from buckets as needed. Mine is about 1/4 ice now. Except it's not running here. -10 last night to +7 today and only got about 1/4 gallon per tap today at most. I think my trees have weather ptsd.
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Mar 28, 2019 01:22
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Yikes, what schizophrenic weather we're having. Been flowing good here, 50g yesterday and finished making another 1.25+, we're over 3gal now. 
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Mar 28, 2019 13:01
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Looks like I may be out here all night. edit: was another 1.5g. I think 50g sap. I don't think it's going to freeze again until Sunday. Cabbages and Kings fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Mar 29, 2019 |
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Mar 28, 2019 21:09
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Actually looks like it might freeze tonight. I had ~20gal out there when I looked, but we still have feet of snow on the ground, so I just buried my entire tank under a good foot of snow, and that ought to keep stuff fine until tomorrow morning. It's in the 40s here but not very sunny. I wish I had a thermometer inside the tank, but it's gotta be at or below fridge temperatures, given that it is a metal box completely encased in 32 degree snow and ice.
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Mar 29, 2019 18:35
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I might be hallucinating but I think last year someone had cloudy syrup. Filters are easy to get. https://www.homehardware.ca/en/12-pack-8-syrup-prefilters-for-cone/p/5210525 Do not use coffee filters. They are too fine and clog easily.
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Mar 30, 2019 11:15
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DreadLlama posted:I might be hallucinating but I think last year someone had cloudy syrup. Filters are easy to get. https://www.homehardware.ca/en/12-pack-8-syrup-prefilters-for-cone/p/5210525 Do not use coffee filters. They are too fine and clog easily. Good cone filters also remove a lot of the niter at the end of the process. I use the orlon style filter with that liner and built an apparatus out of stainless steel to both hold it in place over a pot and also increase the surface area by inverting a portion of the cone.   I was really surprised at how much faster the filtering went with the inverted cone.
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Mar 30, 2019 17:43
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Everything is coming out nice and clear, though dark amber. At about 300gal sap and just over 7g of finished syrup after a lazy Saturday of boiling and getting tipsy. I see the beginning of buds on some trees...
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Mar 31, 2019 02:37
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well, we're not done yet -- trickling decently today after a hard freeze, and given that my elevation keeps our actual temps around 4 degrees cooler than these, the next several days look like they could be okay, too: That sun / mon / tues may be enough to kick things into real spring, but if not, I will keep boiling until I run out of wood or sap. Gath, I assume everything is totally shut down on your end of the world. Postess, how are you making out? I just agreed to sell my parents a gallon for $52, which will be the first actual cash I have recouped from any of this. I will probably try to sell pints and quarts at a similar mark through SAMart, but I'll have to charge shipping, so there's no way I can undercut your local grocer. On the other hand, you'll know that you're helping me prepare a college fund for my kid, even though the planet may not actually be habitable by that point!
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Apr 2, 2019 18:04
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Thrasher posted:One day I’ll quit I.T. and become a woodsman hobbit with a fair sized garden and a shitload of sugar maples. Goals, although I'm more into fruit trees than syrup.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:47
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Made 12L last weekend. Had two septuagenarians and a 5 year old in charge of the operation most of the day. They burned the pan almost instantly, about a 12x8" rect, but luckily caught it quickly and the black stuff was fairly thin. We only had about 70 gallons of sap so I just scraped it all off and kept going, caught it all in periodic straining and the syrup tasted fine. We were in a hurry to finish it so we poured it off a touch early, filtered like an absolute dream. Bottled some up for them and sent them home and I'll just mix the rest with whatever we make this weekend and finish it properly. All my buckets were overflowing last night and I haven't had time to collect.
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Apr 3, 2019 21:13
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 Oh yeah we got 6 inches of wet snow the night before too.
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Apr 3, 2019 21:20
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Postess with the Mostest posted:
niiiice, looks like what hit us is just hitting you maybe a week late. I'm at something like 350gal sap for the season, have finished off 30 liters of syrup. Yesterday was another great day, got around 50gal. Today it looks like it's barely poking above freezing, so I will see what that means. Tomorrow is much warmer, but rainy. I'm optimistic about getting a bunch more sap over the next several warm days, but do suspect we might be at the end of it, because I see some really obvious buds forming on lower branches, and we're going to get a run of days between sun & weds when it'll be into the 50s with no freeze at night. Going by the "12g of sap per tap per season" rule I have often heard quoted here, that would imply I'm probably only going to hit 30% of max capability. So, I will do some more research into why that might be, as far as how I am running my lines, putting in taps, etc. On the other hand, if I'd really gotten 1200gallons of sap this year I would have been utterly incapable of dealing with it all. I'm going to look at the cost of just attaching vacuum to my main lines; if I can do that reasonably and get an RO bucket as well, I might try that next year.
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Apr 4, 2019 17:53
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Boiled from noon to midnight yesterday. 105 gallons total, finished off 3.5 gallons of syrup bringing the season total to 10.6. Some friends stopped by and jammed some games of magic for the first part of the day; at a certain point I had to bail to finish a batch, and so they ran some 1v1 games with BG depths vs BUG Food Chain. There's something slightly distressing about having thousands of dollars worth of cardboard this close to a fairly unofficial fire source. I'm expecting to need to do a small boil today, and then next weekend I'll have at least one more batch to finish based on what's already sweet in the pan. What happens between now and then is anyone's guess; there's still snow on the ground but rain projected today, and it's not supposed to freeze again until maybe tuesday night, more likely on Weds, and then thurs is a hard freeze again. So, we might be just about done, or I might have another week and a half of this poo poo. I'm drowning in syrup and already have some sales lined up, but it'd be sort of dumb to stop as long as I have sap and wood. Cabbages and Kings fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Apr 7, 2019 |
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Apr 7, 2019 14:57
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60 gallons between yesterday and today, so it's still coming. The sap definitely does not taste or smell as crisp or sweet as it did during the first runs, but it also isn't spoiled. (I did have a few gallons of spoiled sap sitting in there under a block of ice in the middle of the week; I used a hose to blast it all out and clean it, dumping it all). It's possible that I could be at this for another week or two if I was really determined, but I've got an event to attend next weekend that's got me tied up from Wednesday on, so I am moving towards shutting things down. The way that will work is, on Sunday I will boil both pans down as far as I'm comfortable, trying to end with ~1" in the shallowest part of the left hand (first pass) pan, and let it all cool over night. On Monday, I will dump the cooled sap from the left hand pan out into my buckets, put some lovely metal down where the pan was, then start a fire with the right hand pan only. There will be a bit of a song and dance in boiling THAT down as far as I can without overcooking it, and that may involve ultimately cheating and using a hose to put the fire out. Then, on Tuesday, I'll have to cook the contents of the right pan down to syrup on my coleman setup. I also need to get my motorcycle loaded onto a trailer that day, after checking out the trailer for winter rust damage, and somehow need to get the car to and from the shop to get my studs off. Tuesday is going to suck, then on wednesday I get to drive for 7 hours with a 2 year old, half of it trailering a 300lb bike behind me. Yay.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:03
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Sounds like you've got an eventful week ahead. Thanks for running these threads, I love lurking them and seeing everyone's different setup.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:14
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Saturday will be my last boil and clean day, getting too warm out to leave sap and doesn't look like much freezing next week, tons of rain starting Sunday. Can't believe I'll have only boiled for 3 days this year. Haven't finished a single drop yet, still have the near-syrup from 1 in a big pot in the kitchen and the near from 2 in a 5 gallon pail buried in a snowbank. Will finish them separate, the 1st should be lighter. Should finish the year with about 30L, half of last year.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:18
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sorry to hear you had a not great season, postess - I've made well more than last year, but I also doubled my taps. I'll be well under the 20ish gal I might expect; somewhere 13-15 depending what's in the pans. Got another 40gal over night, but it's pushing 60 today. I'm boiling but I'm looking to shut everything down and finish a last batch tomorrow or Monday, depending on if it keeps flowing another 24h.
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Apr 13, 2019 13:37
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we are shut down. My wife's flights have been super delayed so I had our two year old in the shack for a lot of it, insanity. 4gal today, 14.6 for season.
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Apr 14, 2019 22:19
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I pulled everything off the trees today as well. Maybe could have gotten more this week but work is bonkers and too many other irons in the fire. 53 taps yielded 12.6 gallons of syrup for the season.
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Apr 15, 2019 00:17
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I am getting ready for a road trip to Niagara Falls; I'm going to try to finance the whole thing selling syrup along the way. Figuring $10/pint scaling down to $30/half gallon.
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Apr 15, 2019 21:04
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I'm going to keep this going until the beginning of next season, just to track all the off season work involved. I use pine as a heat source. I don't have an ATV, and even if I did, most of this stuff is up sketchy vertical grades from where it needs to end up, so I think using an ATV would be sketchy as hell, at least for some significant part of this. Also, I note that I had a donut roll around my belly coming out of the holidays, and this time of year I'm down 10lbs and will be in great shape if I can avoid loving my back up worse than I just did this morning. I'm doing a lot of this right now, it's dual purpose, keeping our trails clear from winterkill and giving me BTUs.   That little 14" Makita electric saw is more of a beast than I was expecting; I've cut 26" sections pretty easily just with some patience. I think I'm going to grab an 18" gas saw for some of the really knotty bigger stuff, trying to decide if I get a Stihl or shell out for Husqvarna... It's looking like I might have enough extra quarts to sell some; if so, I'll link to a SA-Mart thread once that happens.
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May 6, 2019 14:41
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Tim Raines IRL posted:That little 14" Makita electric saw is more of a beast than I was expecting; I've cut 26" sections pretty easily just with some patience. I think I'm going to grab an 18" gas saw for some of the really knotty bigger stuff, trying to decide if I get a Stihl or shell out for Husqvarna... Stihls generally have better reps than Husqs around here. I'd shell out, they last forever and you'll save the money in back pain. I got an 18" stihl 261 a few years ago and it's night and day compared to the entry level husqy I had before that. They generally seem to last forever. On my end, I finally got my buckets clean this weekend, pressure washed inside and out, letting them dry out well and will store them indoors this year.
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May 6, 2019 15:23
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got a few gallons I wouldn't mind unloading on goons, if anyone feels like paying shipping. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3889067
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May 8, 2019 14:32
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Well, gently caress. My processor has basicly stopped talking to me. Typical, lots of work for a pittance then dude screws me on paying me. *sigh well just goes on bad debt on taxes right  Looks like i am going to invest in a ro bucket and a cdl bbq / evaporator. 
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May 13, 2019 18:37
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Gath posted:Well, gently caress. My processor has basicly stopped talking to me. Typical, lots of work for a pittance then dude screws me on paying me. *sigh well just goes on bad debt on taxes right that all sucks and I'm sorry to hear it. But next year you can post production pix!  More prep work today.  Another face cord that went Tree => saw => sections => lovely hauling with a hand cart => move to shack area in trailer for splitting. As a bonus, while I was down there, a neighbor came along and told me they just bought a new log splitter that I am welcome to use for free if I help them tap some trees, so, win-win.  I probably had enough wood already, but felling sixty footers is too fun to pass up on. I felt a little bad about this one because I had to hack up a tiny maple to get to it. There were a couple 80 footers next to it, but I do not think my 14" electric saw is up to that, and they're scary enough that I'll probably just pay a guy I know $35 to come bring one down if I end up needing the wood. Which I don't think I will, especially since I also plan on getting an RO bucket next year. gently caress all this wood, lol. Keeps me in shape, though; I also stacked another full cord of hardwood today, so that's what, like 2000 pounds of lifting right there, twice? 
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May 20, 2019 01:33
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Well i pulled the trigger. 18"x48" cdl evap (with flues) and vacuum filter. I hope next season is good. It will be nice to control whole process. That and spite from showing up and selling at same market as dude who ripped me off.
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Aug 2, 2019 14:31
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Next week begins season of syrupin in WV. Have like 200 drops in and evaporator in a shed. Lets do this. Start a new thread?
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Jan 15, 2020 19:03
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Gath posted:Next week begins season of syrupin in WV. Have like 200 drops in and evaporator in a shed. Lets do this. Next week?? Start it up, I'm not boiling for at least a month probably 6 weeks, supposed to be a cold spring.
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Jan 15, 2020 20:07
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I did a sample tap on a red maple 24" and jammed a half gal jug on drop. Either it filled with rain or sap. (It was full) There were ants in it soo... they were after sugar or oj remnants. I washed it pretty good before putting it on. Fairly certain it was sap. It tasted of sap. Season starts early February, but looks earlier than usual.
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Jan 15, 2020 22:02
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Did winter actually start somewhere? It's been so hot this year that I'm doubtful this year's round of seeds actually got cold stratification.
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Jan 26, 2020 21:40
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Yep, like 2 weeks earlier. I have been working my rear end off. I have got 300+ gallons of 1%-1.5 so i am busy squeezing it down.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:10
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do we want a new thread, or should we just get a mod to rename this "perennially active maple thread" or similar? In any case I have 25 taps in already, and just spent an hour cleaning my tank, and from the dribble I see now I am guessing that if I'd had my poo poo together and had all 120 taps in yesterday morning I might be boiling right now. I will have some pics and thoughts later; right now I have 2.5 hrs more daylight to get in as many more taps as I can. I came in to warm up after taking a bath cleaning the tank, get changed, get my flask and gtfo again 
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Feb 23, 2020 21:00
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