Ash Eater

With all the help I’ve gotten from this forum over the years I think I have a little something that may be helpful to others. Attached is a picture of a little tool I came up with years ago when I was burning coal in my Clayton 1600 furnace. With the poor shaker grate design on the Clayton I had to come up with a better way to Shake down the ash. The one in the Picture is one I made up for my Chubby. I made it out of 7/16” steel rod. It’s 20 inches long and the T piece welded to the end is 1 3/8” long. I just chuck it up in a cordless drill on low speed stuff it down into the coal bed and turn it on. You’ll be amazed at how much ash you get out. The reason I made one up for my chubby is the shaker grate I have doesn’t have the center pin and it doesn’t do a very good job. After three or four days if I don’t really get after it and dig around I lose the fire with too much ash in the bed that I can’t shake out. The ash eater solves that problem. Just make sure you liven up the fire before using it and I’ve never lost a fire due to over shaking.

Cool! Thanks for sharing.

Simple, cheap, and sounds effective. Those are always the best solutions!

There was a young lady on here several days ago with an older Chubby looking for tips on how to best shake the grate. Hope she sees this.

This sounds like a great idea.....I just have to find a wedler. I keep losing fire after 6 hours because of ash build up

I "think" that I'm noticing that the size of the nut coal pieces determines how much air I have to give to the burn.

I'd been burning Kimmel's for the last few days. The pieces of coal in the Kimmel's bags were much larger, somewhere between nut coal and stove coal. I could keep a good burn with the input air open 1/8 ".

Yesterday I opened a bag of Blaschak coal. The coal pieces out of the Blaschak bag were much smaller with sizes somewhere between pea and nut coal. To keep a good burn with this size coal I had to keep the input air opened wider 1/4" - 1/3".

Someone mentioned that the larger size coal packs looser in the burn pot and leaves more air between the pieces of coal whereby the smaller pieces pack tighter in the burn pot with less air between the pieces. This makes perfect sense and explains why I "think" I have to adjust my input air to the size of the pieces of coal.

Your thoughts?

I have an older Chubby model.