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Just some thoughts for alternate ways to heat a masonry oven, besides wood or coal. A friend and I were bouncing ideas back and forth and I'm curious about which of these are really impossible.
1.) A kiln burner. A different kind of oven enthusiast community (builders of kilns and ovens for powder-coating metals) uses propane a lot, apparently. You can get propane burner kits. This would heat the oven by convection rather than radiation, and it would mean that the air coming out of your oven would be very, very hot during heating, correct?
2.) MOLTEN SALT (my favorite). Why not? Molten salt is used in huge solar energy plants to store heat. You would need a blast furnace to melt several pounds of salt, and a (possibly ceramic) crucible to transport it. Instead of building a fire in your oven, you would place the crucible in there to let it transfer heat via radiation. The only reason I can think of that this wouldn't work was if you would simply require way too much molten salt to get your oven up to temperature. Salt melts at like 1400 degrees F. How awesome is that?
3.) Giant magnetron. Aside from likely needing a PhD in physics to design it (it would probably be pretty easy to build with access to a machine shop), you could basically heat your oven with radar. Opening the door while it was on would probably be lethal.
4.) Inductive heating. The bed of the oven would need to contain a liquid-cooled inductor that would heat an iron element sitting in the middle of the oven. More-or-less equivalent to resistive heating, but it might look cool, since the heating element would "magically" become hot.
That's basically what we came up with.
1.) A kiln burner. A different kind of oven enthusiast community (builders of kilns and ovens for powder-coating metals) uses propane a lot, apparently. You can get propane burner kits. This would heat the oven by convection rather than radiation, and it would mean that the air coming out of your oven would be very, very hot during heating, correct?
2.) MOLTEN SALT (my favorite). Why not? Molten salt is used in huge solar energy plants to store heat. You would need a blast furnace to melt several pounds of salt, and a (possibly ceramic) crucible to transport it. Instead of building a fire in your oven, you would place the crucible in there to let it transfer heat via radiation. The only reason I can think of that this wouldn't work was if you would simply require way too much molten salt to get your oven up to temperature. Salt melts at like 1400 degrees F. How awesome is that?
3.) Giant magnetron. Aside from likely needing a PhD in physics to design it (it would probably be pretty easy to build with access to a machine shop), you could basically heat your oven with radar. Opening the door while it was on would probably be lethal.
4.) Inductive heating. The bed of the oven would need to contain a liquid-cooled inductor that would heat an iron element sitting in the middle of the oven. More-or-less equivalent to resistive heating, but it might look cool, since the heating element would "magically" become hot.
That's basically what we came up with.
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