As a kid we heated our old house with a coal furnace. One of my chores was removing the coal ash that fell through the agitator grates. Sometimes things we called ‘clinkers’ would hide in the ashes or if the clinkers were too large to jiggle through the grate, they sat in the burning coal but almost never burned away. For 3 decades of burning firewood, I’d never seen clinkers in my wood ash until this season. This is our first time burning honey locust (admittedly not really dried well enough - some above 30 percent). I only mixed in the HL at 5:1 with nice dry wood into loads. Has anyone else seen clinkers in their Wood ashes? Seems very strange to me.
I have with elm. I burn honey locust almost exclusively and don't notice any clinkers, like I get with elm.
I get clinkers all the time from Elm. The Elm tree out here seems to soak up a certain amount of minerals that are in the soil and water here.
I get them all the time. I believe because I only scoop out the ashes about once a month that the minerals keep bonding together and accumulating.
I get some huge pancake sized lumps of ash that are like sedimentary rock . I suppose you could call that a clinker. Not quite the same as some clinker/slag found in the yard from coal burning days.
Yeah, now that you mention it, those coal clinkers were more solid & dense than the relatively more ‘fluffy’ clinkers in our wood ash.
And now that you all say elm, there’s a good chunk of elm in this season’s stack. Elm is likely the culprit, who would’a thunk?
I burn a pretty good mix = maple (red, sugar) beech, red oak, birch (w, b, y) ash, cherry, box elder, poplar. Just about anything really. No locust or elm. I get some "clincker" material. No ash pan in this stove. I can get them the size Billb3 speaks of, and I don't clear ashes out of the stove much more frequently than Screwloose.
It’s funny that I was just thinking about clinkers over the weekend. Mostly because they have been almost nonexistent in my ash this year. The majority of my wood is usually elm and I commonly get clinkers, they don’t cause me any issues with my setup, just the nature of the beast I figure. This year I’ve been burning a lot more hackberry and a lot of river birch and the clinkers have been much more scarce. I tend to believe that elm is a more prolific breeder of clinkers than other types of trees. But also that it varies somewhat from one elm to the next, some elm making lots of them and others next to none.
