Watts to Pancakes

This is the first year we tapped our maple trees for syrup making. The wife has been collecting bucket loads of sap every day from just two trees. Each of these 2 trees has just one tap in it.

We don't have a very efficient way of boiling down the sap. We have been evaporating the sap on our stove top. I had the inclinatation this is a very inefficient way to go about doing so, so I did some math.

It turns out there are alot of interesting factoids and conversion factors to ponder in maple syrup engineering.

First, I needed to figure out how much electricity our stove top is consuming. I shut off all the circuit breakers in the house, except for the stove top. Then, at the electric meter, I could count how fast our meter was spinning.

From the internet, I found an equation that turns electric meter RPM into watts. It turns out our stove uses 1200 Watts of power for boiling down maple tree sap.

Here are some other factoids necessary for the final math equation:

• I put 2 Tablespoons of syrup on each pancake
• Sap boils down to syrup in a ratio of approximately 40:1
• Our current electric rate is 9 cents per Kilowatt-Hour

Thus, 2 Tablespoons of syrup per pancake = 80 Tablespoons of sap. There are 256 Tablespoons per gallon, thus it may be easier to say that for every 3.2 pancakes you eat, 1 gallon of raw tree sap is consumed.

How fast does our 1200 Watt stovetop boil down sap? That is an important part of the equation behind my final answer. We figure we yield about a half a cup of maple syrup after an 8 hour day of boiling.

So, 8 hours of cook time at 1.2 KW = 9.6 KWH

Thus, 9.6 KWH at 9 cents per KWH = $0.86

These figures assume the production of 1/2 Cup of maple syrup. (1/2 Cup = 8 Tablespoons)

Thus, 9600 Watts divided by 8 Tablespoons = 1200 Watts of power per Tablespoon.

Since I use 2 Tablespoons per pancakes, my final number is 2400 Watts Per Pancake. Wow!