I recently restocked on maple syrup by bartering with Brian from Mill Hollow Maple. One component of this year's home-grown adventure is to be involved in, or at least lay eyes on, all my various foodstuffs during production. So we made a little family outing to go see the boiling as it happened.
He has a really bomber, modern set-up. He has a big arch (where the water heats and evaporates out) and a beautiful capacious home-built sugar house that is as big as a mid-size barn. The coup de grace though is the reverse osmosis filter for removing most of the water from the sap before it goes on to be boiled down to syrup., That nifty pump and membrane reduces energy consumption by somewhere on the order of 75% compared with boiling sap straight from the tree.
-Edmund