51" Oven in France

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Finished pizza.

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Finished pizza try 2...

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Hi all,

A couple of questions for the existing pizza oven users.

As you can see from the below pictures I have quite a lot of black sot on my oven opening. The pictures shows the inner oven opening size and also the second arch that is actually higher then the inner arch. This my father did incorrectly but its not a big deal and I was just thinking of doing another arch in front that will be the same or slightly shorter then the inner arch (tilting the door slightly when needing to close up). This I hope will help capture the smoke and steer it towards the chimney stack.

I think the oven is drawing well but I'm not actually sure what "well" means. Should there be no black smoke going on the outside or is this normal even with a well drawing oven?

How is the exterior of your oven holding up? Black or clean?

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A second issue to inform the group about. As you can see from the above photo the brick floor is resting on a white surface. That is 10cm thick AAC block. Having read through some threads here it is supposed to be a suitable material. It can take the heat well and supposed to insulate well so quite similar to the vermiculite floor base but without the hassle.

Okay so I'm using this as my floor base and after my first real usage of the oven I checked at the end of the day the concrete floor surface on which the AAC block is resting on. It was warm to the touch. Not hot or anything like that but still warm. From this I can draw two conclusions.

1. 10cm AAC block is not sufficient insulation under the brick floor.
2. Since the oven dome was not covered during the winter months the floor received a lot of rain and AAC block sucks up water like crazy. This is normally not an issue and it eventually goes away without any damage to the material. So maybe the AAC block has not fully dried up yet and not working properly. More to follow on this topic later in the summer when I hope all the fires and dry weather will fully dry up the material.

Cheers,
Kosta

[dmun]

The AAC may be damp. Give it a a few firings. We don't have depth of experience with AAC, but 100mm (4") should be sufficient.

I have 2 1/2 inches of mineral fiber board, and my support slab stays cool while firing, but it's warm the next morning (that heat has to go somewhere).

As for the smoke issue, what is the size of your flue? How tall is it?

[Frances]

In case you want to keep the higher outer arch (which does cause smoke to come out of the door while firing up), maybe something like this would help - it works very well for me:

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f9/s...ucer-5190.html (Smoke reducer)

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Thank you Frances. For some reason when I open up your tread, I can see all the messaged but where it says attached thumbnails, I do not see any. Is that the same for anybody else? Could you attach the picture in this thread?

[dmun]

Yeah, James is having picture viewing authorization problems after the changes this week. Frances, maybe you could paste into the message the url of the image?

[Frances]

Ok, lets see how this works...

Its really like a draught door, but gap at the bottom is big enough to add wood without removing it.

Once the fire has started properly the smoke stops coming out the front, and then a higher outer arch has the advantage of giving you more headroom while making pizzas.

[Dino_Pizza]

Hi Kosta, glad to see you're back on the forum. I see you and your father have been busy over the winter and the oven is done. Your pizza looks great! I like the eggplant and the mushrooms and the crust looks perfect.

Frances has a good solution for the outer arch draft door but like dmun says, make sure the brick and insulation are dry, make sure you are using dry, seasoned wood then see if you need to tile or brick a facade to the outer arch and drop it and inch or so to keep the smoke in. But wait a few fires and you'll know how much if any to bring it down. Take care, Dino