Re: Modify Metal Barrel Oven

In my experience, unless you have a lot of thermal mass (which also require a lot of preheating time), the most likely thing to cause problems over many pizzas is the floor, not the dome. The dome gets a lot of direct heat, and multiple pizza really don’t remove heat from the top. Each pizza, on the other hand, takes heat away from the floor, both by transferring it to the dough, and due to the evaporation of the dough water.

Even in a massive brick wood fired oven, the floor gets cooler if you launch the pizza always in the same location. People using bigger ovens, tend to use different areas to let the floor “recharge” between pizzas. Clearly you do not have the floor space to do so.

I would not mess with the dome insulation, mostly because older fiber that went thru a lot of thermal cycles can produce dangerous dust (ceramic fibers are really bad for your lungs), and because you are unlikely to see a benefit but will need much longer preheat times to get the dome to temperature.

You can try adding more…