Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

[V-wiz]

Re: Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

Just burn smaller fires in the center until you get enough coals to spread to the walls. No biggie..just be patient.

By doing this that would mean having hot spots at the center/top of the dome and having the bottom walls be a lot cooler, and doesn't this cause cracks? the large temp variation? Is this the correct understanding?

[Tscarborough]

Re: Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

Cactus burner.

[stonecutter]

Re: Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

Just burn smaller fires in the center until you get enough coals to spread to the walls. No biggie..just be patient.

[V-wiz]

Re: Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

thanks man, that sucks that you burnt up the Thermo, well it so cheap you can get another one.

[okn]

Re: Steady good heat without the large flames. How?

Nice picture. I don’t have a great answer for you. As I was doing my curing fires I kept thinking about where to measure the temperature. I mean it’s all over the place when you have a small fire. The dome could be 500 under the fire, 300 where the dome meets the side wall, the side wall at 250 and the floor by the side wall at 175 and floor by the fire at 300. I just ended up building progressively larger fires, and when they burned down spread the coals and closed the door.

By the way, I forgot my oven thermometer (like the one in the picture) inside the oven and built a fire right on top of it. After racking it out of glowing coals, I had more or less burnt all the writing off it.

[V-wiz]

Ive been curing the oven for a few days now. Started out with a propane weed burner, did that about twice, got it up to 175-200. After that ive been using charcoal and heat beads/briquets. Last night i got the oven up to 350-375 using charcoal and some small chunks of wood. So how does one create a steady, even hot fire while not having flames, or at least large flames? What do you do? lay out small pieces of split wood all over the floor and light it up so the heat is evenly distributed? or do you create a fire in the middle then spread it out?


Here is a picture from last night. The charcoal is not cutting it anymore, i need more heat.