Choosing Your System

Most producers come to us with the same pain I had six, seven years ago: sick of going down to the pump house in the middle of the night just to check on things. This guide walks through how to pick the right setup — Sensor Hub, Gateway, nodes, and sensors — for your size of operation, and how to start small and add on later.

Start at the Pump House: The Sensor Hub#

Almost everyone starts with the Sensor Hub. It's our all-in-one, cellular-connected unit — vacuum, temperature, and tank level in one box for your pump house. I basically wanted monitoring on the most critical point, the pump house, and that's exactly what we built the Sensor Hub for. It's been our flagship for about six years, and it fits producers anywhere from a couple hundred taps to several thousand.

It watches the things that actually matter: vacuum at the releaser, tank level, and temperature, recording every 5 minutes so you can see it from any phone or PC. What most producers really want is to sit at home, wake up in the middle of the night, look at it at work and know: is the tank three-quarters full? Did the pump shut off? Did I lose vacuum? That's the hub's job.

No power and no Wi-Fi at your sugar bush? That's exactly what the cellular hub is for. It runs on its internal battery, and you've got a few charging options — see Power & Battery.

You can start with just the hub and add sensor nodes — end-of-line vacuum, a water meter, extra tanks — that first year or in future years.

Hub or Gateway?#

Think of it as the way they talk to nodes is different. A node talking to a gateway can talk louder and talk slower — so the range is a lot more, up to about a mile through the bush, and it's more scalable and easier to set up, especially for larger producers. Each node talks straight to the gateway, and the first year of cellular is included.

The trade-offs — and this is why we started with the hub — the hub is a lower data rate, which means a lower subscription. It's like having a phone in the woods instead of having a computer in the woods. If you don't have any power out there, the hub definitely works well. The gateway does have a solar panel and battery option, but it's a thousand dollars additional — so it's harder to justify the gateway for smaller operations if you don't have power at the pump house.

One other difference: the gateway doesn't have sensors on it. The sensing comes from the nodes. The hub is the all-in-one unit with the sensors built in.

For a larger or multi-property operation — growing toward several thousand and up to ~10,000 taps — the gateway is the right backbone instead. Even then, the smart move is to start with a gateway and a few nodes to confirm range across your terrain before committing to the full build.

Sensor Nodes and Sensors#

Ports and the Universal Node#

Nodes come in 1-, 2-, 3-, or 4-port versions, and one physical node can monitor multiple mainlines. Most typical is a 2- or 3-port node — say six 3-port nodes to pick up 18 mainlines. You don't have to buy them all at once; add nodes as you expand.

We've moved to the Universal Sensor Node and no longer stock the old version-1 single-vacuum-port style. Same functionality — we just moved the vacuum sensor to the outside to make it more universal. The universal node also has larger solar panels and can take multiple sensors: plug in whatever sensor you need, up to 3 per node, and in the web app you can turn the visibility of any unused ports on or off.

What sensors can a node take?#

A universal node accepts up to three sensors, in any mix:

  • Vacuum sensor (digital) — end-of-line or at a releaser
  • Submersible tank-level sensor — any sap tank up to ~10' tall (IBC totes, stainless tanks, sap silos, bulk tanks)
  • Ultrasonic tank-level sensor — non-contact alternative
  • Pressure sensor (1/4" NPT) — pairs with a vacuum sensor to measure level on a tank under vacuum (we read the vacuum as reference, do the math, and show you % full)
  • Water meter — via the node's pulse-counting input, for gallons/hour and season totals

Sizing Your System Before You Buy#

For gateway operations I'll usually put together two quotes so you can phase it in:

  • Starter/Test Kit — the gateway plus a handful of universal nodes and vacuum sensors (e.g. 5 nodes + 5 vacuum sensors). Gets you running so you can confirm range and connectivity before committing.
  • Full System — the gateway plus enough nodes and vacuum sensors to cover end-of-line vacuum on all mainlines, plus vacuum and tank visibility at each pump house.

To size it before you buy, use our Coverage Planner (best on a PC) — I can pre-load your property and build a few alternative gateway placements to compare. We can also loan you a Field Tester to walk the property and actually map signal strength via GPS.

FAQs

I'd say about half of the guys your size — a couple hundred taps up to 2,000 even — just have the hub in their pump house monitoring that critical thing. Other guys will add nodes, either that first year or in future years. And some guys just say, my desperate need is the pump house, I'm just going to keep using the hub forever.

If you've got vacuum gauges where your main lines split and you can walk the woods quickly, you may not need nodes at all.

Yes, we also make a Wi-Fi hub — but there's no sense adding Wi-Fi just for monitoring; about 95% of customers run cellular because that's the more common scenario.

Not currently — the hardware can, but we avoid one-off variations. Closest is the node with one vacuum sensor plus one vacuum port, typically used at a second collection tank to watch a releaser's vacuum and that tank's level.

I'll be completely transparent with you. The hub accepts nodes today, and any hub you have out there — we'll still sell nodes compatible with it for several years. But over this off-season and early next season, we're going to keep offering the hub but really position it for a single pump house, and anybody who wants nodes will migrate to the gateway. Just from a simplicity-of-the-platform standpoint, the gateway is a more modern way to do that — more range, more scalable, easier to set up.

It's hard to put a time frame on it, but for the next two to three years we're going to offer two types of nodes: one that talks to hubs and gateways, and the new version of the node that will only talk to gateways. Eventually we'll retire the original version-one node.

The likely gen-two version of the hub — probably next summer's development, not this year — is to make it universal, kind of like our universal node: plug in one, two, or three sensors, but without the ability to talk to nodes.

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Have a question this doesn't answer? Email info@sapspy.com or call 920-809-4811 — we're producers too.