Vent design

[james]

The question of vent design come up frequently. Here is a sticky posting that address some of those questions.

There are two fundamental ways to build your vent, both of which are very common. There is no right or wrong:

Open, where you attach a steel vent to your enclosure walls, frame it in, and leave the walls open. This method give a specific design look had has the advantage of leaving you a large, open oven landing.

Closed, where you enclosure the vent sides with brick or a wall. The vent landing has it own entry arch (from any material). The method gives you a traditional look. If you want a larger work space in front of the oven, you can space the side walls wider than the oven opening; you can angle the walls outware, and you can build a second oven landing in front of the vent landing.

You can build your walled-in vent in one of four ways:
1. Build the entire assembly out of brick.
2. Have a metal vent fabricated, and build it in with walls or bricks.
3. Buy vent pieces from Forno Bravo.
4. Cast your own vent pieces using refractory concrete.

Hopefully the attached graphics help make this clear.
James

[feenster]

It seems that access and visibility into the oven would be considerably better with the open vent (hung with no side walls) design. But would this design hold heat less well? It seems that the vent enclosure on the closed vent design would help minimize heat loss from the oven by direct radiation (?) and convection (by shielding the oven door from drafts). Is this one of those difficult design compromises, or are these issues not real?
Doug