Fire Bricks.

[trenchn]

Hi,
I have aquired some fire bricks from the inside of a night storage heater that I am hoping to use in the construction of my oven. Any comments on whether this is a good idea and if so how best to use them?
Cheers
Nick

[dmun]

Most of us don't know what a night storage heater is. Some kind of long-burning solid fuel heater would be my guess. Maybe a picture would help?

[trenchn]

A night storage heater is an electric devise that uses cheap(??) overnight electricity to heat up heat retaining bricks, which then release their heat gradually the next day.
Once popular in England.

[asudavew]

Originally Posted by trenchn

A night storage heater is an electric devise that uses cheap(??) overnight electricity to heat up heat retaining bricks, which then release their heat gradually the next day.
Once popular in England.

Sounds like that is exactly what you need.

[Carl]

I'm coming from the very cheap and cheerful end of the building spectrum, and had wondered about using these. You didn't get them off ebay did you? If so, I think I was watching them, but didn't go for them because it was too far from home to be worth the effort.

If they're like the ones I've seen, they're about 9 inches square and 2-3 inches thick. I had wondered about using them as hearth tiles, then building the walls of the dome on top of them. If you had a lot of them I guess you could cut them up into thinner bits and use them to build the dome too - a bit like the pictures of the roman pompei ovens on this site that use ceramic tile. I decided this was way too much effort for me...

From my little bit of research I found that night storage heater bricks are refractory brick in most cases, since they have to stand the high temperatures of the electric element. They're selected to have a high specific heat capacity (i.e. store lots of heat over a long time), and to retain heat over a long period. What I read sounded positive about using them in an oven.

If I had some, I'd try an ad-hoc oven first, maybe just dry stacking a bunch of them in a pile roughly and having a decent sized fire inside/on top of the pile. No substitute for a proper test in an oven, but might show you if they'd crack or spall before you've put a lot of effort in.