36" low dome - Fire dies when push back from gallery

[stevef22]

Hi working on my 36" internal diameter brick pizza oven. Dome and front gallery completed with about 10" chimney opening.

When I start the fire in the gallery, great. Burns fine.

After about 10 mins, I push the well lit wood into the oven and it dies and smokes.

Maybe my door opening is too high? Top of oven measure 16" Door height is about 13"

[fox]

When was the oven built? How much time did you spend drying it out?

[stevef22]

Recently build. Im on 2nd small fire to help dry out dome. These are small fires, just a few twigs etc. They burn great in the opening. Its when I push inside they die. The wood is dried oak twigs and small pcs.

Just bricks and motar. No fireblanket + perlite exterior yet


Could the dome be too "wet" ?

[Petter]

Add the blanket or you will crack your dome.

Use thinner kindeling If the fire dies. The fire consumes the oxygen in the dome and before it is warm, the convection (which let new air in) is poor.

[stevef22]

ok thank you

[fox]

Steve, you are at a critical point of your construction and you need to go easy and take care with the drying process.
As Petter points out it can help to distribute the heat if you add some insulation around the dome other wise you can just spot heat the upper dome.
To answer your original question, it is difficult to light a fire in a damp high humidity environment but get easier as the dome dry out.

[UtahBeehiver]

IMHO, I would not do any fires in the dome until you "get" the insulation on. The insulation helps minimize the temperature differential between the inside and outside of the oven reducing the potential of cracking. When the dome is insulated I like to do a couple warm up fires with charcoal briquettes (that will get you up to about 200 F. You can cook something in a dutch oven as well. With wood you need to be extra careful, one extra piece of wood will spike the temp quickly. This is the point in the builds where we see a lot of builders get a little impatient and fire too soon, too hot and too quickly and they crack their domes.

[stevef22]

Thanks guys, not going to burn any more test fires untill blanket "installed". Great tip on using charcole to make much smaller controled fires 200F then slowly moving up.