nick grady

Thanks for the links, I let ya know how it ago. It would be nice have a green house attached to the sugar house, to dump excess heat into greenhouse. Could be good for for starts. As sugaring more or less coinsides with when one might start some annuals. Then after sugaring you may not need to heat at all or very little anyway, if earth intergrated.

Does ANYONE have a design or thoughts on a rocket stove sap boiler for maple sugar production? I'm tapping about 50 now and am basiclly going to suspend a 10 gallon pot over a pocket rocket and boil that outside. I fairly confident it will work for this relatively small opperation. However any thoughts/ideas welcome and I'm scaling up and need a bigger evaporator, one with a 2'x4' pan that the heat will pass under. I have a few ideas but always welcome more especially from anyone with evaporaor experience or rocket stove experience.

Mollisin talks about using a partial vaccum on the still to decrease evap temp of alcohol, requiring less heat for distillation. To obain the vaccum it was suggested to hook a venturi valve to a pipe with water flow ing (from a stream) through it. He said it was even possible to just heat with the sun. It's on an audio recording of a pdc from 1983 that's well circulated. It may also be on the recorded pdc from 2007ish. I think it could be tough to boil 400 gallons period I don't know if an 8" rocket stove would do it, but like I said I don't know. Anyhow even without a vaccum you would not have to reach 100c to distill.

I dig by hand, though not opposed to mechcanization, I have many different tools to do this with: pick, round shovel, square shove, rock bar etc. There's just one tool thats name I dont know; it's tee shaped (just like a pick), has a slightly elongated ax head on one side and an elongated and thickened hoe shape on the other (same peice of metal). This thing has helped, more than I can say, in my digging endevours ever since I was a child. I first heard it called a hedgehog then it was a grub hoe, collins ax, finally a rootmatic. If anyone has any insight into the nominclature of this crater maker I would be much interested. BUT I'D REALY LIKE ONE OF THOSE TICKETS TO FURTHER MY KNOWLEDGE OF EARTHWERKS BOTH HUMAN AND MACHINE POWERED

hi, I'm 33 live in Vermont and I like your nose ring