[Stoves] Desktop research topic for someone....Re: Accidental TLUD technique discovery

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

[Default] On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 01:59:00 +0000,Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
<crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

>I take up the question of the word 'riddling'. In the days of yore when everyone burned coal if the kitchen stove, the grate was not a 'wood grate' as we now prefer to make them, they consisted of individual grate bars that had a square end accessible by opening a door on the front. 
>
>When I was young we heated the house with three coal shoes and the one in the kitchen had this type of bar-grate. When the ash build up was reasonable, a loose handle was slipped over the square end of the bar and they were rotated a little back and forth (not round and round). Each bar was thus 'riddled'. The grate was not shaken as there was no single grate to shake. 
>
>I understood the word 'riddle' to mean the action of shaking the bars individually to bring down the ash. If stones built up they could of course be rotated to drop them. 
>
>Shaking the grate is a different concept from what we consider a wood stove grate being bodily shaken to drop the ash. Such a grate cannot be 'riddled'. 


We used to riddle  the rayburn to let the ash fall through the grate,
my father had a riddle in the garden for riddling weeds and stones
from soil, my mother had a sieve in the kitchen for sifting flour ;-).

AJH