Homebrew Castable Oven

[david s]

My moisture meter has three levels red, yellow and green. Depends where you place it as the top will get drier first, but I try and take it down to the red indicator.
When firing you can also feel with your hand that the outside will feel slightly moist. Another method is to throw some plastic sheeting over the oven to see if moisture condenses on the underside.
you can hurry the drying and only do it partially probably safely, although once you’ve rendered over it the remaining moisture is harder to remove.

[ebbbe]

Hi guys

Insulating the oven ended up taking longer than I thought, because I figured I could do each of the layers of perlcrete in one go (based on my experience with 1:5 perlcrete for the insulating slab). Turns out you guys were right (as always) when you said 1:10 perlcrete really isn't very workable. I ended up doing the first layer of ~40mm of perlcrete in 10cm rings for the lower half af the dome. For the second layer I made a form.

Anyways. It's been drying out for a long while now with me checking the wheather daily and covering with tarp when it said rain. I borrowed my brothers moisturemeter and as far as I understand it it's at 0,5-0,6% moisture now and has been at that for a long while.

I figured I'd try to dry it out and cook a little now.

I've found some different approaches to the curing fires. This one (https://www.fornobravo.com/pompeii-oven/curing/) says 300°F the first day then increase 50°F a day and hold each temp for 6 hours. This post (https://community.fornobravo.com/for...33-oven-curing) says start at 100°F and increase 100°F each day and then stopping when you reach the temperature. This sounds a bit easier.

Which one would you recommend?

[UtahBeehiver]

Really slow and low temp. Increase. You can start a couple fires with charcoal which will get you around 250 f. When you move to wood very small amounts, one extra log will spike temp too fast. If you are seeing steam off the pcrete you are going too hot and fast. This is where we see builders get impatient or excited and fire up too hot too fast and crack their ovens.

[Johno4]

Any updates on this? How is it going?