I'm coming from the very cheap and cheerful end of the building spectrum, and had wondered about using these. You didn't get them off ebay did you? If so, I think I was watching them, but didn't go for them because it was too far from home to be worth the effort.
If they're like the ones I've seen, they're about 9 inches square and 2-3 inches thick. I had wondered about using them as hearth tiles, then building the walls of the dome on top of them. If you had a lot of them I guess you could cut them up into thinner bits and use them to build the dome too - a bit like the pictures of the roman pompei ovens on this site that use ceramic tile. I decided this was way too much effort for me...
From my little bit of research I found that night storage heater bricks are refractory brick in most cases, since they have to stand the high temperatures of the electric element. They're selected to have a high specific heat capacity (i.e. store lots of heat over a long time), and to retain heat over a long period. What I read sounded positive about using them in an oven.
If I had some, I'd try an ad-hoc oven first, maybe just dry stacking a bunch of them in a pile roughly and having a decent sized fire inside/on top of the pile. No substitute for a proper test in an oven, but might show you if they'd crack or spall before you've put a lot of effort in.
Leave a comment: