losing heat fast on the floor...

[dmun]

I also see brick joint damp marks on the outside of your stucco. Insulation between the brick dome and the cladding is every bit as important as the insulation under the floor. Having a well insulated dome will let your dome heat up and reflect down on your cooking floor.

And yes, sand and gravel under your oven may be leaking a lot of heat, unless the gravel is volcanic pumice or something insulating.

The good news is that your dome is so high, you will have room to raise the floor if needed for cooking performance. Be a better hight to work from, too, from the looks of things.

[Les]

Jackie,

This isn’t solving your problem, but what is in the wheelbarrow? Is that what you are firing the oven with?

Les…

[gjbingham]

I like the idea of raising the floor. 2 inches of isoboard then a layer of brick on top, perhaps even half thickness brick would help a ton. I agree that sand and gravel under the floor is most likely sucking your floor heat away faster than you can put it in there.

[berryst]

My thoughts.
It seems to me that if you tried a commercial pizza stone set up on a couple of bricks... would heat up fast. Hot air would circulate under and radiant heat above. Seems like it would work for pizza. Banks of hot coals around the stone could not hurt. Seems like it would e a quick cheap fix. The worst case scenario is you still have the stone if it doesn't work

[christo]

Cool looking rustic oven!!!

As other have said, Insulation under the floor and over the dome is key.

If your floor is brick, you should be able to pull most of them out and resuse them. Id leave a row or two of bricks at the wall to keep the dome stable.

You might be able to excavate some of the gravel and sand and replace with vermiculite concrete mix to the 4 to 6 inch thickness referenced eariler. If you don't want to change the height of the floor, when replacing the bricks I'd leave a gap that will fill with ash to isolate the new floor from the bricks you could not pull out at the sides of the oven. That should leave you with a isolated floating floor that will absorb heat and keep it much longer. If you go this way - please be careful as the oven looks plenty heavy and a collapse could be a tad bit problematic for someone crawled up inside the oven....

By keeping a fire in the oven you should get enough refelctive heat to cook the top of the pizza without insulating the top dome. It will lose heat quickly so keeping consistent heat for baking/roasting might be a challenge. This might be a tradeoff if it is important to you to keep the traditional look of the oven. And you can always go back later and add insulation to the dome....

My 2 cents!

Have fun!

Christo

[Dutchoven]

Well...looks like a traditional southwest horno...in which case the floor was placed without any insulation...that base was meant to be a heat sink for longer term slow cooking...also there is no insulation on the dome...just mud...if you want to do pizza for any length of time that floor and dome will need to be insulated
Best
Dutch