Carbon & Ash

When I clean the inside of the glass on our wood burner every morning I wet a piece of kitchen towel, dip it in the wood ash and use the resulting paste to easily remove the carbon and tar deposits. Works a treat.

When wood is burned it splits into 2 parts - the ash, which is alkali, and carbon, which is acidic. The former neutralises the molecular bonds of the latter, making it easy to remove.

Now, as wood ash is alkali, I thought I'd try household bleach, as it's a powerful alkali, but it was a very poor substitute. A modicum of asking Google Bard (which is my new ChatGPT - much better and more up-to-date) told me that this is because wood ash contains potassium carbonate, which reacts with carbon, whereas bleach contains sodium hypochlorite, which doesn't.

When I was a kid my mother would give me charcoal tablets for an upset stomach. The theory was that carbon attracts organic molecules and the carbon would mop up any bad bacteria. The problem is that carbon mops up any organic molecule, including the beneficial ones - a bit like broad spectrum antibiotics.

The consensus now is that chomping on charcoal for an upset stomach simply turns your boo black and gives you the shits.