Niagara Region checking in.

[rblanchette]

Hi everyone,

My name is Rob and have been planning an outdoor oven since I bought my house in July. Hope to be starting in the spring. Was looking at the beaver design from Quebec that goes back generations in my family, and others. Civilization.ca - Marius Barbeau - The Bread Ovens of Quebec

Now I've been thinking about going further and building a more solid oven, in my opinion.

[Jed]

Re: Niagara Region checking in.

Hi Rob and welcome to this forum,

I've just spent a bit of time scanning the book you referenced. Looks like great reading, lots of great people stories, and some pointers on building functioning ovens.

The only significant modification I might suggest for a modern oven is to take advantage of modern insulation information and do as good a job as you can to insulate the actual cooking chamber on your oven. It will improve the performance of your oven.

I sure look forward to your build. We don't see very many clay oven builds on this forum, but as evidenced by the ovens in the book, they certainly work and last!

Keep us posted.

JED

[rblanchette]

Re: Niagara Region checking in.

Thanks for the welcome Jed,

Since reading more on this site, I'm not sure what kind of temps I'll be able to get out of the clay ovens. I really love pizza and the clay oven I was planning is more for bread. I was thinking about using the design to some extent, but would like to use a castable refactory cement, if I can find it.

[Jed]

Re: Niagara Region checking in.

rblanchette,

I think you can plan to get 'good' - meaning plenty hot temps from a clay oven. The challenge, is getting all of the mass in your oven hot enough. And that is determined by how much 'mass' you include in your design.

With a clay oven, your wall needs to be thick enough to be structurally sound. How thick is that? I have no idea, but if you build it 'to' thick, it will take for ever and a bunch of wood to get all of the mass hot.

One of the beauties of the Pompeii design is the fire box, or dome construction is made from a uniform material, so you have a system to control the mass of your oven (and when you use a low duty fire brick you are sure to have a material that works well for the assigned job). And the Pompeii design includes insulation, thermal breaks between the hot and the cold parts of the oven.

In the performance of an oven, these two components are the only one's that make a difference. In terms of oven performance, it doesn't make any difference what kind of a stand you have, you can build the oven on the ground... and the way you keep the weather off the oven doesn't make a difference with oven performance (just something to keep the weather off...).

Anyway, good luck with your planning!

JED