building my first WFO

[erwinjohnbbq]

Hello everyone!! My name's JOHN and I live in the Philppines. I've been cooking pizzas and baking breads for a couple of years now and I'm planning to put up a pizza delivery business here in the city where I'm living. Wood fired brick oven cooked pizzas are inexistent here and I'm very confident that these will be accepted by the people here giving the popular pizza restaurants here a serious run for their money. All the pizza stores here are cooking their pizzas thru their convection ovens and I'm sure everyone knows that nothing beats a pizza cooked in a WFO.

I've been reading a lot of articles in the websites on how to build WFOs from woodfiredpizza.org to mha-net.org to traditionalovens.com, However, most of the details I've read are for WFOs built for home use.

I believe a 42" x 50" internal size oven would suit my daily needs (lets say from 30 to 50 pizzas daily, with oven being fired from 10am to 11pm). My question is regarding the insulation requirements for the WFO that I'll be building. How shall I go about insulating my oven? Will a 6" vermiculite insulation underneath the hearth, 4" cladding on top and around the oven and a 6" vermiculite insulation on the side of the oven and 9" on top before stucco, be enough for this purpose? Or is there any other way I can safely insulate my oven so I can use them daily? I found good quality firebricks that contain a fairly high percentage of alumina (36%) with bulk density of 2210 kg/m2. Are these firebricks good enough for the project?

All the other materials from vermiculites to the refractory bonding mortars and castables are readily available here except for the insulating boards. I can't seem to find them here. I just hope the vermiculites and perlites can fully serve its purpose without thouse insulation boards.

These are the questions that I have for now and I hope can be answered by anyone of you guys. This site has really been a big help to me. Thank you very much and kudos to ALL.

JOHN