Never had a clinker

I get major clinkers whenever I burn red elm. It must have a high mineral content. I would think that hedge would give a lot of clinkers too since there is a naturally high silica content to the wood (gives it that "fleck" in the wood, makes the chain throw sparks), but I don't think I've ever gotten one from it.

 

This season I've had clinkers that look like a two to three inch chunk of unburned wood. You hit them with the poker and they crumble up like sand. Some of it may even be sand and dirt that was on the wood that got fused in the fire. The wood I've burned so far this season was the stuff I got from the town, so I know it's local, for sure.

 

Yeah, I would like to see one. And I am very interested in how hard they are; most of the posters seem to have said that they can be broken up easily. If that is the case, and I certainly do not doubt what anyone is saying here, then they are not what I would call clinkers- just a chunk of something stuck modestly together in the ashes. As I said before, a true clinker cannot be broken with a hammer; it is like a nugget of slag mixed with steel and is fused ash. Wood cannot make that same thing as the ash from wood will not fuse.

I think perhaps the words are getting in the way here too: having burned hard coal, and having had to deal with clinkers, I would not use that word for a lump of anything in the ash residue of a woodstove. Surely there are lumps in there now and again, along with the occasional half- melted nail, the occasional badly mutilated but still sorta' recognizable fence hinge and once, even a large, flat casting of aluminum in the bottom of the ash pan that I have absolutely no idea what might have been the source material (it was not small- it must have been 10 ounces of aluminum cast into a new and exciting shape) but never anything resembling a coal clinker.

Having had to drive clinkers out of coal burner grates, I have a lot of respect for the little fellas' (OK, it is fear, I admit it ). I have been burning wood for a long time and have never seen anything left behind after a wood fire that was hard enough to break the teeth of a cast iron grate so I guess I am reserving the word 'clinker' for those magical coal byproducts.

Brian

 

No, never. In fact, I do not think I have ever seen feed corn or 'dent' corn, and I know I have never seen corn kernels loose from the cob and dried. I live in the northeast and the only corn around here is sweet corn generally. The only 'cow' corn I have ever seen was being ground up as silage (I think is what it was called). While I am not really a 'city boy', I was raised in suburbia where milk comes from the refrigerated section of the supermarket, and beef comes wrapped in plastic. I really am quite ignorant of agriculture, farming, etc., etc..

Please understand I am not really arguing with you folks who find lumps in your stoves I am sure you do / have, and all of the explanations are no doubt correct. All I was trying to point out is that a clinker, by definition, is fused coal ash and they just cannot be made by wood or corn or any other 'non- mineral' form of fuel that I know of. Sort of like linen sheets are not really made from linen, they are made from cotton which by definition is NOT linen. So when we go to the 'linens' section of the store and buy 'linen', usually bedsheets and similar, it is really not linen at all, which is made from the fibers of the flax plant. Cotton is made from, well, cotton plants. Sometimes if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it may not be a duck at all.

Brian

 

we have a winner! fox gets the cupie doll

 

I used to get that all the time in the princess insert too, not sure if that contributes to the forming a clinker or not but the clinkers were in that same general area but smaller and harder.

 

Well this was informative, because I was really not sure what a clinker was but I've had a lot of them some of them pretty hard too.
Hey now I know what a real clinker is too
I never thought it was a big deal or would cause a problem.
I have burned a lot of pallet wood with nails in them and that does seem to cause any problem either.
Pulled out a 5 inch square piece of fencing the other day not sure where that came from

 

I don't think any sort of 'lumps' are much of a problem in a woodstove. But coal burning stoves have a shaker grate, which means the grate moves in some way, usually one half tips in relationship to the other half to grind up the ash, separate it from the coal bed and allow it to fall through. This is necessary because coal has to draft from under the grate and if the coal bed cannot be 'shaken down', the coal bed burns down until the lumps of coal are small and all fit together and shut the airflow through the coal down, then that device is done burning coal until the problem is resolved. The word 'clinker' comes from the noise a clinker makes when the shaker grates are.... well, shaken. When a big clinker jams the grates stuck, it can be quite the time and [bad word] consuming deal to remove it.

Brian

 

we had a coal furnace when I was a kid I didn't know anything about it except how to shovel coal and wood into it, we also burned some trash in it and even though my sisters had been warned not to put hair spray cans in the trash one got in the furnace, a 5 inch round came flying out the door smack into the basement wall with a thud, just missed my dad, I was further away but saw it, man that was scary

 

It's funny I just caught this thread, I pulled a "clumper" out my Answer last night while raking the coal bed forward. I usually find them at the front of the stove and they end looking almost like a flat piece of volcanic rock, real porous, and they crumble if I mess with them too much. This one was probably about an inch thick and 3"x5". I just rolled it onto the shovel and dropped it in the ash bucket.

 

I emptied the ashes last night and found a "clinker" for you folks. It's not hard like steel but very solid like a dry cookie.

 

Now that we're burning almost 100% red oak we're getting huge wood stove pancake-sized clinkers like those too. Never in the back, always in the front near the door. First one I pulled out was so huge I thought I was removing a firebrick. I've gotten small ones in the past in other stoves but not like these.