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Congratulations! You all have worked so hard on this project. Have fun with it.
BTW... Without me delving into the past posts, did you install a powered vent fan on your chimney? Otherwise, that window shaker is gonna earn its keep.
I stand corrected. I see the relevant photos now. Big enough *and* sufficient heat retention to roast a buffalo! Probably takes a quarter-cord to cold-start though.
So far the oven has exeeded my expectations...after a week of slow fire, then 2 weeks rest, I fired for another week, building more fire each day till I hit 1,050f, then let off for a couple hours till it "cooled" to 850 to 900f and got the pizza in under 2 minute thing.
I stop feeding it bits of dry wood at around 8 pm and oven coasts from 800 down to 500 by next morning (with no door yet). To bring it back up takes a whole bushel basket of small, dry hardwoods feed over 3 hours. I don't have my various thermocouples hooked up, so I don't know how deep the heat is going just yet. I am using less than a pickup truck load of hardwood per week and around 2 trash cans full per day of small hardwood pieces from a local cabinet factory.
Lots of cracks everywhere, but none threatening. Outside the dome temp seems to be ambient, it's hot here, but dome around 90-95f. Have a few hot spots around the "girdle" which was poured and therefore more dense/less air entrapment and is not as good an insulator as the top portion of the dome, which was troweled on "fluffier".
43 bags of perlite, 10 bags of CA cement, 12 bags of regular portland cement, 1 bag lime, 3 bags fireclay, over 1,000 firebricks and uncounted hours of labor...just to get some good pizza! more pix coming.
Trying to learn what I can about flours, fermentation and flames...
And I thought my oven was hungry?? Wow that pizza looks great! That's our plans for tomorrow, so have the fire lit now. If the dough was ready we could have pizza tonight - 745? on the hearth, 780? in the dome after 4 hours of fire with "junk" wood (a alanthus snag fell in the yard a few days ago so thought this would be a good way to do some yard cleanup). The hearth 5 inches deep is 535?. I'll let this fire burn down to saturate the dome and see what we have in there tomorrow.
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