Question on thermal mass Pompeii Oven Construction Discuss Question on thermal mass in the Pizza Oven Design and Installation forums; Mutual material's standard fire bricks are low duty fire bricks, exactly what you want, so it sounds like you are ...

[maver]

Mutual material's standard fire bricks are low duty fire bricks, exactly what you want, so it sounds like you are good there. I can't make any good suggestion on thermocouples as I only use IR.

[wlively]

Are the thermocouples (TC's) going to be your only source of temp? I ask, because that will matter. You were asking about increased mass for extended baking. Placing the TC's into the heart of that mass will tell you the temp saturation of the mass, which once you get to know the thermal charactertistics will give you a good gauge of baking time or energy remaining. If it will be your only source of temp then you will probably want one very near the surface of the brick to better gauge face temp.

I have 3, all the center of the bricks. They are in the floor, middle dome, and top center. I can tell you that the floor is the last part to heat up, as it lags behind the others by 250-300 degrees. So keep that in mind, that with high floor mass you are going to need a very long fire to get the floor mass saturated. If I only had two then I would go floor and 3/4 dome height.

As for length, only one of my TC's needed to be over 3 ft. You can buy extension wire, with plugs at each end, or could buy bare wire and connectors to create whatever length you want. If you are anal like me, you need to keep the lengths of each TC wire the same to prevent small difference in temp readings. Of course we are only talking 1-3 degrees.

[Kulas]

I'm not sure if this is the thread I should post this question on, but here goes: Can the pompei oven maintain its hearth temp with fire going if one would make pizza continously for an hour?

Just a curious question. I read a lot about heat retention with regards to the pompei oven used in baking bread but what about its hearth floor heat retention while making pizza?