I am thinking of building a wood-fired oven in my yard and am considering buying a prefab kit or assembled oven. Can anyone offer suggestions as to which are recommended? To be avoided? Yes, I am fully aware of the need to construct a base and housing for the oven. Thanks.
A base is optional for many of the prefab, DIY-to-finish, wood burning ovens. Steel frames are available, or you can have a frame custom made locally.
https://www.fornobravo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Canada-Vesuvio-310x220.jpg
Very popular are the ovens sold through Forno Bravo, tho there seems to be endless brands imported from Italy and elsewhere in Easter Euro.
The drawback from any oven kit is that your stuck with design limits and you are paying for the shipping of what is essentially dead-weight, e.g. a low value item that is heavy and costly to ship, like flour is.
If you are open to building a base for an oven kit, would you also be open to building the entire oven from scratch? It is much easier than most folks realize. The advantage is you get total control over every aspect of the design, and you can pick up all of the materials you need at a local building supply – no shipping cost!
If you are open to building an oven yourself, I suggest spending some time cruising Rado’s website. He is from Eastern Europe but now lives in Australia. He is a professional refractory mason, (he builds industrial ovens with fire brick). Rado has a love thing for wood burning ovens, thinks everyone should own one. He has posted lots of info on them, lots of photos, as well as designs for a few kinds for home use ovens. Read other folks comments there for references to other websites with oven designs.
For prefab, Rado recommends ‘Volta’ and ‘Spazio’ ovens. Here is a link to Volta with FREE shipping.
https://www.grillsnovens.com/outdoor-pizza-oven-kit.html
I recommend spending time on Rado’s website reading and reading and reading before jumping into any wood fire oven. One take-away I got from doing that is that I do NOT want a round pizza oven. They seem more for show than function. My interest is in cooking as many things as possible in the oven, Pizza, meats, pastas and breads, etc. A rectangular oven is better for my needs. If you want a round oven Rado recommends using a kit, do not build it yourself with fire bricks.
“Rectangular dome & round floor igloo dome types”
https://www.traditionaloven.com/building/details/igloooven.shtml
Rado’s website:
Excellent advice, and I shall certainly check out the site. Some years ago I bought Daniel Wing’s The Bread Builders and was inspired by that book to someday build my own, but I’m exploring all the alternatives, as I have no experience with projects of this scale. Thanks again for your help…
One thing you need to consider is the length of time to get a wood fired oven up to temp for cooking size does matter.
It takes 45-min to an hour to heat up an oven in the kitchen with a pizza stone and/or cloche in it.
Rado has something about the time it takes to heat a wood burning oven on his website:
How long does it take to heat up my wood fired pizza oven?
As per home ovens, the longest time I have seen is 2 hours for an oven being fired up to the carbon burn of temperature - it was a bigger family home oven holding heat comfortably for 40 breads surface area, whole lamb or 6 roasting pots with lids for big turkeys. Backyard or house wood burning ovens will be fully heated up in 1 to 1 1/2 hours. This is the aim. There is an early phase in the firing when the oven can smoke as you start it- it lacks fire kick start, it has thermal inertia. This is minimized by using dry wood, thin kindling, and blowing air into it. As the fire builds up in the temperature, the gasses given off by the burning wood will ignite and the whole oven will be filled with flames not smoke.
It is important when you build the oven to design and to make the flue in the front (also often referred to as hood, vent or smoke box or just flue box) and the chimney connection on top correctly as they draw off and direct the exhaust, and as well, it is very important to calculate carefully the 63% ratio of the entry door height to the inside dome vault height for proper burning. Construction of these two parts is not difficult but significant for achieving the best function within your oven. Necessity equal to the heat insulation on top which protect the energy stored after the heating process.
Anyone interested in a wood burning oven may benefit from spending time reading the info Rado is sharing on his website. It does suck you in … well, it got me hooked, looking at the photos folks send in of the ovens they built. I spent time reading everything and studying every picture for a complete oven built. That is when I realized almost anyone could build a wood burning oven. Some folks have built multiple ovens. Others have made a business building ovens for other folks.