Hi from Tring

[james9]

We're just about to start a 36' Pompeii build near Tring, Herts based roughly on the FB plans although some of the builds on UK-WFOF are much superior.

We went on a wood fired cooking course at Manna from Devon a couple of months ago which was pretty amazing and highly recommended, they use Bushman ovens who recently had a competition, needless to say we didn't win so are building a Pompeii from scratch. The advice we got from Manna was less (smaller) is better than large and insulation is really important for getting the oven up to temperature and it gives more cooking flexibility as it cools.

The plan is to build a corner oven with a 2m long counter for preparation. I've done some design stuff in Excel using scaled drawings although very interested to hear any about other software.

Good to hear from anyone.
James

[oblertone]

Welcome James, there are indeed some fantastic builds on FB but sometimes they are drastically over-engineered; stick to the basic principles and you'll be fine, but insulation is key !

[downunderdave]

Be careful if planning a corner build. There are two main problems, firstly it gets really difficult to finish the outer layers if they end up close to the walls. Secondly, you end up with an unusable space behind the oven which is extremely difficult to access. An enclosure style rather than an igloo is a is a good solution, or blend the oven into the corner so the vermicrete goes right up to the walls.