This is my first year burning elm and MAN does it leave a thick fluffy layer of ash... Oak in my experience has been pretty good in leaving the least but Ive only been burning a year Whats the most and whats the least producers of ash out there?
Some produces more than others but overall most are not all that much different. Ash is a byproduct and that is how we've always looked at it and never considered doing a study to see how much ash one type of wood gets vs another type. We just know that some wood produces more but it does not bother us in the least. It is just part of burning wood.
Ash removal in my stove is a pain as well... Many times, the ammt. of ash produced has a direct correlation with the density of the wood you're feeding it. But not always..
I think this is true, but has more to do with the temperature at which is burned. A colder fire is going to produce more ash and a hot (like gasification boiler hot) is going to produce very little ash when burning the exact same wood.
I think ash does correlate to how dense the wood is AND how hot you're burning. I know that oak seems to have the least ash content, as well as locust. Woods like poplar, walnut, silver maple.....they put out quite a bit of ash, IMO...... Maple and the clinkers......that's what I find to be a nuisance. I love burning maple, but hate the clink.........
Oak and BL leave little ash behind perhaps because they, cube for cube, burn hotter longer than softer wood. Each split gets longer exposure to more heat? Just a guess. Red elm leaves crazy big clinkers in my stove.
Can you get those klinkers to re-ignite if you rake em all together and get some air to them? Or just black duds?
the worst I've seen was poplar, but I'm thinking cottonwood and aspen would probably be about the same. Clinkers won't burn, they just hog up the coal pile.....sometimes, depending on what the soil was like where the maple was growing, we'd get some really big ones......I've seen them around 5" across, and around 1 1/2" thick before in the stove!
What we been calling clinkers, may well be unburnt coals... At least some... Cause if you stir hedge ashes around, all the unburnt stuff will start to glow if ya can get air to them. Some never burn...
