When to Do Clean Up

Some miners like to “clean up” the sluice boxes after each hour of operation. Some others prefer to clean up at the end of a days work. Others will even let some days go by before cleaning up. All is a matter of preference and few times has it to do with the real needs of the sluice box. Some of the large scale operations from the 1900s used to allow the lower two thirds of the boxes will operate for many months non-stop before cleaning them and without any fear to lose some gold, but it is true that in those days sluice boxes were longer.

There is a method to determine when a sluice box needs a clean up so that you can continue operating it at its maximum efficiency. If most part of gold is being trapped in the upper third of the sluice box then the recovery system is working properly.

After operating a sluice box for a long period of time without cleaning, riffles will have concentrated a very large amount of heavy materials behind them. Sometimes abundant amounts of strongly concentrated materials in a sluice box can reduce the efficiency of riffles, but this is not always the case. It very much depends on the types of riffles being used and how they have been placed inside the box. The true proof that the set of riffles is losing its efficiency because it is being overcharged with heavy concentrates is when gold starts to be trapped farther away within the long box instead of where it is usually trapped. When this happens it is definitely the time to clean the box.

Expansive metal riffles, being short, tends to overcharge with heavy black sands much faster than the longer types of riffles. However, to have a great and visible amount of black sands present is not necessarily a signal that you are losing gold.

Gold weighs around four times more than black sands, while there still is a flux action in back of the riffles, black sands will generally not have any effect I n recovering of gold. Although deeper riffles can sometimes overcharge and be crushed by a heavier concentrate. Once again, it much depends on how the system has been placed, in the type of material that is being worked, the purity and therefore weight of gold, as well as other factors.

The best way to evaluate the recovery system is by means of direct observation of where is gold being trapped.