Wood Charcoal oven?

[chromo]

Has anyone thought of this, for the hobby craft though scaled up it should work for the pros also.

For many people the cost of electric is high, or availability low for high powered stuff. I'm working towards getting rid of the grid myself, go wind and solar power instead so of course I don't want to be adding High Demand electric items if I don't have too. I could never go off grid and power an electric oven large enough to do cycle frames!

Propane is like gasolene, the price is everywhere and never the same 2 days in a row, never low like it used to be. Perhaps a 20lb tank runs my cook stove about month, was $8 to fill the tank a few years ago, I think now about $14 to fill same tank. I never had a large 250gal or bigger tank installed, just not using that much gas here to be worth it. I don't want to be baking with $14 20lb tanks much.

Now, wood or charcoal, well that's pretty cheap here, almost free for me. Is free if I cut my own wood, other than the time and a little oil etc...
I use an electric chainsaw and batteries carried in my truck bed are charged from wind power when not in use.

So I am thinking, build a firebox outside or in a safe place. Pipe the heat into the oven several ways. One is to run 2 pipes, 1 top 1 bottom to the oven, flow the heat up off the fire box into the oven with top pipe and draw air from oven to firebox with bottom pipe. This should create a gentle airflow in the bake oven, keep the heat equal top and bottom, the pipes are just recirculating the oven air, so other than powder dust the pipes should stay clean. The fire would not be near the loose powder so safe there.
When we cut off air flow to a fire it goes out, so the fire box sealed we can shut down the fire by closing a damper. When we blow air into a fire and fan the flames the fire burns hotter, heck we can melt and cast aluminum with plain wood charoal, I've done that
So if we install the thermocouple in the oven, use it to controll a small fan at the firebox to fan the flames, it would seem that we could control the oven temps still pretty well. When oven is too cool fan runs, fans the fire, lots of heat made. When oven is hot enough fan shuts down, restricted airflow to fire keeps fire burning with lower heat untill more heat is needed and fan runs again.
Depending if a cheap source of fire feul is available or not this could save allot of money on power bills for some people if properly built. Some places like CA. may outlaw fireplaces and woodburners so maybe not usable everywhere.
Built correctly I think for a home hobby shop or even the pros this would work well. A fire could be built up on say Friday night and just kept going all weekend so oven is always preheated and ready to work.
With a large fire box it's just a matter of load it, light it, forget it, for as long as the load of wood burns. So larger firebox load once in morning or evening. Smaller fire box you may need to load 2-3 times daily.

How well something like this might work depends on the work habbits and parts. For baking for 1 hour a day a few times a week, maybe not worthwhile.
If you'll be baking parts all day and half the night for the whole weekend it may work very well.
For a LARGE oven for cycle frames, trailer frames, etc... the power savings might really add up fast even for just a couple parts. For a couple nuts and bolts, not worth it.

As for polution, wood is a cleaner heat source than the feul used by power plants. Electric is wrongfully thought of as a clean power because people do not see the polution right at their home, but most electric production is not clean!
Also wood is re-newable where as coal and oil are not. So if it works for you well then wood is a better choice for more reasons than just saving money!

In the money aspect of a wood oven, that would vary for everyone. I saw in a post some-one estimated it costs them $1.08 to run their oven for an hour.
Figuring if my cost were the same, then to bake 8hrs on Sat. Sun. 16 hours total would be about $17.28 per weekend or $69.12 month with 4 weekends in a month. For $5 I can buy enough scrap wood to last a couple months of weekends from a local sawmill plus maybe $10 for my gas to haul the wood home. I only used about $25-$30 of the same wood to heat my home all winter. So the cost to just keep an oven fired all weekend would be almost nothing here.

[SEEJAY5]

Very interesting, but who's gonna try it?

[baz]

very interesting but the way i see it if i have a oven working 16 hours on the weekend alone means i have lots of powdercoating to do .
with an oven big enough to do bike frames i am sure to make a minimum of 50 $ an hour (and that is really a minimum that an oven like that should produce)
so 50 X 16 hours = 800 $ minimum so i don t really see why go through all that to save $17.28 out of 800$
this represents about 2% of the money you can make in your weekend.
i think that spending less than 20$ to make a minimum of 800$ is nothing ,
it will cost much mure in time just to build such oven.
of course this is just my opinion

[chromo]

SEEJAY5
Well, I'm gonna try it. I do allot with charcoal and wood around here anyway, and it won't cost much more than a normal oven.

Baz,
You have points, but then again $20 you save is another $20 you would have.
With such an oven also if the power goes down for a weekend your still up and running, povided you have backup power for your compressor and sprayer etc..
Without such an oven you might be out the entire $800 when you sitting wonder when the power will come back on to run the oven.

Well guys, I know it's not an idea for everyone, just an idea I though I'd share. For me and the crappy power grid we have here and the fact I am trying to get off grid it's an idea that might work very well and certainly for me worth trying.
Last thing I need to add is a giant power hog oven here when I am adding solar and wind generators so I can shut off the grid someday hopefully soon.
I could power everything else fine without the grid, not an electric oven as big as I would want though.

[fl70]

Sounds real interesting.
Be sure to keep us updated with a good journal and plenty of pics.

[baz]

Originally Posted by chromo

SEEJAY5
Well, I'm gonna try it. I do allot with charcoal and wood around here anyway, and it won't cost much more than a normal oven.

Baz,
You have points, but then again $20 you save is another $20 you would have.
With such an oven also if the power goes down for a weekend your still up and running, povided you have backup power for your compressor and sprayer etc..
Without such an oven you might be out the entire $800 when you sitting wonder when the power will come back on to run the oven.

Well guys, I know it's not an idea for everyone, just an idea I though I'd share. For me and the crappy power grid we have here and the fact I am trying to get off grid it's an idea that might work very well and certainly for me worth trying.
Last thing I need to add is a giant power hog oven here when I am adding solar and wind generators so I can shut off the grid someday hopefully soon.
I could power everything else fine without the grid, not an electric oven as big as I would want though.

like you say it is not an idea for everyone , i don t even heat my home with wood because it takes too much of my time for me it costs less to fill the furnace with oil turn on the heater and spend more time in the shop working

but this is why we have these forums . to hear different point of vues on a given subject .
let us know how it works out and pics too

[Banditperformance]

Chromo, that was me, with the $1.08/hr cost fro my 200+ cubic foot oven. ANd in reality, BAZ is right, With an oven load. the electricity cost is very minimal. especially when there is $100-200 worth of product in the oven at one time. Yesterday, I baked over 200 pcs, 3 bakings. I charged the customer $1/ piece and $15 per baking an oven full.

Wood/charcoal will cost alot more in time, mess etc, I would think. I live in an area that predominanely heats houses with Wood heat. I know how much work is involved with wood.