All Artesian Ovens are built with a refracory concrete and re-enforced with steel fibers. Many refractories can take high heat, but are suseptible to thermal cycling. This is the process of heating up and cooling down. Our high heat concrete will last for thousands of thermal cyclings and is able to withstand temperatures of 2500 degrees F. and don't worry, you will not get your oven to that temperature! Certain design principles come into play to have an outdoor oven working properly such as the door height to dome height ratio. This needs to be correct for proper air flow to heat the entire oven evenly. Where the heated air exhausts is also important for proper air flow. Our ovens do not come with a built in chimney but a hole in which a standard stove pipe can be inserted. Most people build an enclosure around the stove pipe, or stove pipe hole. If you want you want you can also build a brick chimney around the exhaust hole.
Be sure to check out our designs page to see our optional door, customizable pre-made archway and granite landing slabs!!
Our standard oven has an inside diameter of 36 inches and a wall thickness of appprox 4 inches. This is about the most useful all around oven. Getting to much smaller makes them hard to manage with keeping the heat and being able to have room to bake. Getting much larger and you need more time and wood to fire them up to temperature. This size will allow you to bake a couple of traditional pizzas at a time, a few loaves of bread, or a full size family meal at one time.
If you plan on baking large quanities of bread or other items we can custom build you an oven to your specified size. For baking large quanities of bread you want a thicker walled oven, around 6 inches, that has more thermal mass to retain the heat required for multiple bakings. You may also want to go up in size to a 42 or 46 inch oven. Over this size gets harder to ship and place on your base, but can be done.