Soaking your bricks - how long?

[pizzahead]

How long should you soak your fire bricks before you lay them. I have some soaking at the moment and it started raining before I could lay them so they have been soaking for a couple of days now. Can you soak them for too long?

Cheers
Jase

[dusty]

Re: Soaking your bricks - how long?

I don't think so, but the longer they soak, the longer it will take them to dry out.

I'm no expert, but when I took one out of the bucket to lay it, I put the next one in. I suppose they soaked for 5 minutes or so.

dusty

[nissanneill]

Re: Soaking your bricks - how long?

When I was laboring for my brickie doing all of my retaining walls, I stacked the bricks 4 wide X 8 long and around a metre in height and ran the hose over them. If in summer, spray the hose on your stacks until they absorb a reasonable amount of moisture but they don't need to 'soak in water'. If you wish, dunk them into a bucket for say 10 - 15 seconds, let them initially drain and then lay them. They will be moist but not soaking wet.
Yes, as Dusty says, the wetter they are, the longer they will take to dry out but they start drying as soon as you finish laying them.
The brickie only yesterday, the one finishing off Paul Henderson's oven was laying new bricks that had been wet but looked only damp. He is a lecturer in bricklaying here in TafeSA.

Neill

[RTflorida]

Re: Soaking your bricks - how long?

I've seen the phrase "put them in a bucket of water until they stop boiling" mentioned by several members in various threads. What this means is wait long enough for the air bubbles to dissipate.....in my case, that was about 10 minutes. Seems to work - I had great mortar adhesion, had to re-wet very few bricks, and by the next day the bricks had a dry appearance (of course they were not completely dry internally, they just didn't appear water logged).

RT

[Ken524]

Re: Soaking your bricks - how long?

I also soaked mine until they stopped bubbling. Worked very nicely.