Graham Chiu

Sorry, I never finished this thread .. but all the tubes were deemed faulty and were replaced under warranty.

I guess I'll have to replace them again at the 10-15 year mark.

One of the criteria for a rocket stove is that the riser be insulated.  This allows a higher heat in the riser to enable to combustion of secondary gases.
That thing doesn't look like it's insulated, but if you could insulate it, it would work more in lines with the principles of a rocket stove.

I didn't read the whole thread so didn't notice if the question were answered but a rocket stove by definition has an insulated riser.  That's according to the inventor Larry Winiarksi.
So, all those metal things you see around there aren't rocket stoves by definition.

How much wood is required to get it hot enough to cook the Neapolitan pizza?  And it's not 6 hours of burning wood to get it to this temperature is it?

At last count I have 4 of those light weight insulated steel pizza ovens which work fine .. the original being the Bakerstone.  All of them use a pizza stone, and the fire has to be kept going in order for them to work correctly.  Some of them even have little rocket stoves attached!

However, I have yet to see anyone build successfully a domestic pizza oven that uses a brick floor that is heated by the exhaust gases of a rocket stove.  If someone has a link, I'd love to see it.

Lots of biochar being formed there?

Does it get hot enough to make steam?  Just wondering if it could be used as a boiler to steam sterilise stuff.

Julia Winter wrote:

So, I will dispute the claim that you have to have a stinky smoky "fire in the cooking space" oven to make excellent pizza.

Hi Julia

I specified that this was required for a high mass oven.  I didn't follow your link but I believe it's a low mass oven.

Hi Thomas

If your oven works then I'll copy it.

But pizza ovens need conductive, radiant, and convective heat. And your design is mainly going to provide convective heat with no radiant, and only conductive after several hours if you have high mass floor.

Cheers

Very nice.  I think I'd cover the roof with some steel plate and then insulate with the ceramic wool.  Although they make claims about this and that, who knows what happens to the structure of the wool after long-term use?  And the steel can reflect heat down onto what is being cooked.

I've never seen any mass cooker reach Neapolitan cooking temperatures with the fire outside the oven. It just can't be done as heat carried by air is inefficient.  If you want to cook Neapolitan you might as well consider the possibility of creating a fire in the black oven, in which case you'll need a decent chimney to take the smoke away from the chefs.  In which case the oven needs to be lined with fire bricks.  Good job it's all dry stacked!  New York style pizza can be done at ordinary baking temperatures.