"Andy Phillips" wrote in
:

Hi,
I have a pizza oven made from refractory cement (see
http://www.purimachos.demon.co.uk/pizza.htm). This works OK, but the
walls are not thick enough to retain much heat - therefore, having
heated the oven with a wood fire and raked it out, it's only possible
to cook about two pizzas before it's cooled down. I'd like to be able
to cook at least four pizzas and maybe some bread afterwards. I
therefore need to thicken the wall to increase the heat capacity - I
thought by adding at least one course of bricks around the sides and
top of the oven, followed by an inch or so of render. Question is, do
I need to use special heat-proof bricks (eg firebricks) and cement, or
can I get away with normal house bricks and mortar? I'm concerned
that the mortar and render will crack - when in use, the outer wall of
the oven gets too hot to touch for more than an instant - I would
guess about 100-140C. Any advice appreciated.
Andy




Andy,

Did you build the oven or did a professional oven builder/mason build
it?

If you had a professional or mason build it, you should ask him. It
would seem to me that having an exterior surface that is oven 100C is
not a good thing and should be covered by guarantee.

If you built it, then check your instructions to see if you maybe left
out something. If you followed the instructions to the letter, get in
touch with the people who provided the instructions.

I'd also worry about to the very short cooking time. This indicates to
me that you don't have near the thermal mass you should have.

My experience with industrial annealing ovens was that they didn't
transfer too much heat to the outer surface and they took a long time to
cool down for maintenance, but it's been 40 years, so I might be a
little foggy on the fine points. g

Barry