BOCES students learn how to filter maple syrup

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WBNG) - Students in the building trades class at Broome-Tioga BOCES are producing homemade maple syrup — about 50 bottles per year — using a reverse osmosis system they built themselves.

The project uses common plumbing equipment to remove water from maple sap before it is boiled and refined. The processed sap is then sent to the BOCES culinary department for further processing and packaging for sale.

Reverse osmosis system

Junior Zachary Salmini described the filtering process.

“You hook up the tubes to the barrels over there, it’ll go through the pumps, and go through a filter that will go through four other filters,” Salmini said. “That’ll go through a bucket and turn into sap. One bucket will be sap and the other will be purified water.”

When asked why removing the water from the sap was important, Salmini said the answer was straightforward.

“I don’t think you’d want watered-down maple syrup, would you?” he said.

Salmini said the build came with challenges.

“I think we put the frame in lopsided and we had less materials than we thought,” he said.

Lessons beyond the classroom

Salmini said the project taught him more than plumbing.

“Patience. It’s more of a patience thing,” he said. “I think when putting it together, it’s like a learning process. It’s learning stuff you usually don’t think you’d need to learn.”

Integrated Science Teacher Erik Thompson said the real-world complications were part of the lesson.

“Things never work out exactly like in the books and we found that out here too,” Thompson said. “The students would cut the lines too short, have a little too much vibration, it would be in the wrong orientation, and they would have to realize that that’s a problem and then craft their own solution to it.”