The aim of this paper is to describe the latest steps in the development of a computer model to predict the combined effects of plant conditions and coal quality on burnout. The work was conducted as part of RWE's contribution to the recent ECSC project `Development of a carbon-in-ash notification system (CARNO)'. A burnout predictor code has been developed and validated; it includes both coal and plant effects and includes a burnout model based closely on CBK8. The agreement between predicted c-in-ash and plant data is encouraging, but further improvements are still desirable. The predictions obtained from the burnout predictor show that the calculated sensitivities to changes in plant condition can be very dependent on state of plant. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.