New member, Old oven..

[Kachina]

Hello,

A new member with a old oven.

We just started restoring a old property in North West Spain, Galicia. In the property is this old oven which is in pretty good condition. Just finished some touching up the mortar and will be restoring the interior in due course. I have a bunch of questions in order to finish restoration, so will be firing them at you in due course. Firstly, i think im going to need a Chimney..as the whole room is designed to fill with smoke, and well, its going to be our kitchen with grill area, along with wood fired cast iron oven too.

[IMG]PhotoPlog - Finished Ovens[/IMG]

Hoping you can help me.

The oven as you can see in the photos does not have a chimney, the whole area above the oven was used as a giant smoker for the production of ''Chorizo'', the drying of crops and other things.

We would like to create a chimney over the oven, using a front mounted flue. I also want to build a smoker above the oven and wanted some ideas for that if possible.

The Oven is built from mostly large granite blocks, its a metre high inside.

It produces a huge amount of smoke intially and my first question is really what size of Chimney do i need? is there a formula for the creation of them.

My best regards, and thanks for a wonderful forum!

Peace and best wishes.

[DrakeRemoray]

Re: New member, Old oven..

That is a very cool old oven. I am no expert on the chimney thing though...

[staestc]

Re: New member, Old oven..

And it is way cool that you found us too!! Welcome to the forum I am sure that with the depth and breadth of experience the members here have you fill find willing answers to your questions (or at least expert postulations on what those answers likely are!).

Travis

[nissanneill]

Re: New member, Old oven..

Hi Kachina,
and welcome aboard.
Keep those pictures coming so that we can play with them for ideas.
If you are remodelling your kitchen depending on what you are trying to achieve, a nice stainless vent could be your answer to catch all the smoke emitted from your oven fire up, especially if you are to 'modernise' it with new stainless appliances.
If not and trying to keep the 'olde world charm', then make a similar unit and tile it with stone tiles or similar.
Very easy and cheap to make with max efficiency and effect. You would need to cut back what looks like a metal hood so that the new one would funnel all the smoke up through what looks like an existing chimney.
You could also incorporate an small fan in the system to ensure total extraction of the smoke.

Cheers.

Neill

[Jed]

Re: New member, Old oven..

Kachina,

Good looking oven and I applaud the effort to get the old oven working again... It is a good thing to be using a wood fired oven.

Earlier this year, one of the guys did the work to present a formula that helps evaluate chimney function...

Go to this thread and read it through...

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f28/...ator-3905.html

I think this will give you some solid information to help design your chimney.

Good luck with the project and keep us posted (we really like the pictures!)

Best

JED

[Kachina]

Re: New member, Old oven..

Hi,

Thank you for the warm welcome all enjoying the forum and knowledge here immensely.

The chimney calculations are most useful, thank you Jed. Im reading that thread now.

Neill, thanks a lot for those pictures, really does help to visualize how it could work and look. The kitchen will be a old world kitchen, wood fired oven, wood fired horno (cooker) and a grill area. We want to keep it all stone if we can and will build the grill area next to the oven from local granite which is the stone used to build the house.

Also, our Horno is about 100 years old, so it will be all olde world in this kitchen as we have fallen in love with wood fired cooking and most houses here still use wood fired (cast iron) cookers on a day to day basis. We live a self sufficient lifestyle so the weekly collection of Gas bottles for the cooker and water heating we need isnt good for us. We want to build in some kind of water heating system around the oven as it will be used daily for bread and baking.

I was hoping to build the grill area next to the oven for ease of moving hot ashes over to use in there and wanted to somehow join these two chimney's together into a single outlet through the roof.

It isnt a metal hood above the cooker, but some kind of stone extraction that leads nowhere, i am not sure what this was used for as it collects the smoke, but channels it nowhere. I guess it is something connected to the smoking of Chorizo, it collects the smoke and heat but is closed, so when the fire is alight smoke and heat rise into that area and gradually drain out through the back. Here is a pic of that.



It gets very hot in that area, i just cant work out how that worked. According to the people we brought the property off the oven has never had a chimney.

Ok, off to immerse myself in chimney calculations!

Many thanks for all your help!

Best regards.

[nissanneill]

Re: New member, Old oven..

Kachina,
Just got home from celebrating my twin daughters 29th birthday, and it is almost midnight.
I'm not sure of what the latest picture is showing, it is a little confusing!
Can you provide a simple sketch of what/where you plan on your gas grill so I can put some thought into a common chimney.
Will sleep on it and come back tomorrow with a possible solution. It still needs some details sorting.

Neill

[nissanneill]

Re: New member, Old oven..

Kachina,
I can see the existing construction and it does go nowhere. I would remove it completely and look at replacing it with something more practical which would work like:
An easy (but maybe expensive if you have to pay to get one made), is to make a copper hood and flue as the pic, An old wooden copper liner (as a new one would only look out of place), would be ideal as it could be cut and carefully beaten to your shape and style venting into a copper or old steel flue.
I can't see how (if you were to place your gas fired grill adjacent to the oven) you could get them to vent nicely through a single chimney.
I would go for 2, an olde world coppery one for the oven and a more modern (but not ultra modern) for the new grille, both side by side exiting through the roof.

Neill

[christo]

Re: New member, Old oven..

That thing does look a lot like a stone version of the hood that Neill is proposing. Could it have been a hood and someone plugged it with mud or concrete?

Christo