DIY brick heating stove

Brick heating stoves are still in demand among the ordinary user living in country houses or in country houses. With their help, it is possible to heat not only the residential building itself, but also the sauna with a steam room available on the site. Before you build a stove in your suburban economy, it is useful to familiarize yourself with the known varieties of these structures. In addition, a novice master will have to study the basic schemes for laying stove structures and master the techniques of working with bricks at home.

Varieties of ovens

Before you build a stove with your own hands, you will need to familiarize yourself with the existing varieties of units for the house, subdivided into the following classes:

• cooking constructions;
• cooking and heating stoves;
• stoves designed exclusively for heating.

A do-it-yourself cooking stove made at home is optimal for a summer cottage or a suburban area where the owners live in the summer. Most often it is used as a supplement to other heating devices in order to save on expensive energy resources. It is equipped with a hob and a special tank used to heat drinking water. Despite the small size of the structure itself, its heat output is enough to heat a medium-sized structure.

Cooking and heating stoves allow:

• Cook;
• use as an oven;
• build in a tank for heating water;
• organize a place for drying food.

Furnaces of this type are in demand at summer cottages during seasonal work.

Purely heating structures are used only for heating residential and office premises. Often they are equipped with additional tanks, allowing them to be installed in the bath as a fireplace or used to heat water.

When assessing the design of a future furnace, it is necessary to determine in a timely manner its shape and dimensions, depending on the room in which it is planned to be installed.

Choosing a place to install a brick oven

Before making the stove yourself, it is important to decide on the zone of its permanent location. It is allowed to be built anywhere, however, the most effective in terms of heat transfer is considered to be built into a wall between two adjacent rooms. This approach, with a small building area, allows you to get by with one heating structure with sufficient heat transfer.

It is not allowed to install the stove close to the outer wall of the room, since in this case it will cool down and it is useless to spend the stored heat - to warm the street. The following points are also taken into account when choosing a suitable location:

• the height of the ceiling in the area of ​​the stove location, allowing it to fit into the space according to its dimensions;
• the possibility of arranging the foundation, taking into account the fact that it will be slightly larger in size than the base;
• the absence of floor beams and rafters in the area of ​​the pipe outlet to the roof.

Taking these factors into account will allow you to correctly place the stove within the boundaries of the room.

Masonry materials

When considering the materials used in masonry work, first of all, the existing varieties of brick products are taken into account. Before choosing an orderly laying scheme, it is necessary to clarify for what brick size the structure is designed, which will eliminate serious errors. The possibility of using figured wedge-shaped blanks, often used when laying arched vaults, is also taken into account.

For facades, bricks with rounded corners or other non-standard configuration are often used. The furnace scheme used during operation takes into account all options for brick material, laid according to the order and the table attached to it. In addition, the following product characteristics are taken into account:

• "Branded" strength of a brick, which is understood as a mechanical load sustained by the material for a long time without consequences for its structure;
• frost resistance;
• thermal conductivity;
• hygroscopicity.

The first of these parameters is indicated by the letter M and a simple three-digit number indicating the permissible load in kgf / cm². For the laying of the functional part of the furnace, a brick of a grade not lower than M150 is needed. If the furnace structure is particularly massive, products of the M200 or M250 brands will be required for its construction. The frost resistance of the brick is indicated by the Latin letter F in the marking with a number designation next to it. The latter expresses a minimum of cycles of freezing and thawing of brick material without losing its strength characteristics.

The stove is a heat engineering structure and must accumulate heat well, gradually releasing it into the room. To fulfill this requirement, a brick is selected with a thermal conductivity index of at least 0.61 W / meter per degree. The exception is the materials going to the external finishing of the chimney, where the thermal insulation properties of the structure are important.

The hygroscopicity or ability of a material to absorb moisture is usually expressed as a percentage of its mass.

Types of bricks

Any do-it-yourself stove, assembled for the stated purposes, is capable of working only if the source material is correctly selected. For its construction, the following types of bricks are used:

• silicate;
• ceramic;
• pressed stamps.

Silicate products attract specialists with the correct form, as well as smooth surfaces and a variety of colors. In their manufacture, well-purified quartz sand and lime additives are used. Ceramic bricks made from special types of clay are ideal for laying stoves and fireplaces of all kinds.

From the description of the pressed varieties of brick products, it follows that they are produced on the basis of the rejection of rocks of the calcareous group: dolomite, limestone, shell rock, marble and the like. Portland cement, added at the rate of 10% of the total mass, performs the function of a binder here. This type is found mainly in the original designs used in the manufacture of exotic dishes (barbecue, for example).

Conventional stoves for a house or a bath are laid out exclusively from solid bricks.

Do-it-yourself stove foundation

It is possible to make a high-quality stove for a household if a reliable foundation is prepared for it. Increased attention is paid to this element of the construction of the furnace, since the ability to perform its functions depends on the reliability of the base. Before equipping it, it is important to determine the dimensions of the stove structure and its total weight along with the chimney.

The depth of the foundation depends on the following factors:

• soil quality;
• heaving of the soil in this place;
• the depth of its freezing;
• groundwater level.

By design, the bases are monolithic, solidly poured with concrete, rubble, made of small natural stones and columnar (pile). Brick kilns are traditionally built on rubble or monolithic foundations, which have the following advantages:

• ease of arrangement;
• comparative cheapness of materials;
• the ability to withstand significant weight (load).

When constructing small structures, preference is given to a rubble foundation, on the arrangement of which less money is spent.

Masonry kiln solutions

The strength and durability of the furnace under construction directly depends on the correct preparation of the masonry furnace mortar, which ensures a high-quality seam. Its average thickness should not exceed 8 mm, since cracks appear in thicker joints over time, significantly reducing the efficiency of heating the surrounding space. For this, the masonry mortar is prepared from high-quality clay mixed with carefully sifted sand. According to the instructions for preparation, when kneading, it is brought to a state of a homogeneous mass that does not contain lumps and large impurities.

There are several types of masonry mortar: skinny, normal or greasy. To obtain any of them, when mixing with water, carefully monitor the consistency of the mixture until it reaches a state similar to a thick dough. As soon as it stops sticking to human hands and the trowel, the solution is ready. For laying refractory bricks, a special composition is prepared, which, in addition to greasy clay, includes chamotte sand, taken in the right proportion.

Features of stove masonry

Several options for laying are known, the diagrams of which are usually attached to the drawings of the stoves:

• Dutch scheme;
• V. Bykov's heating structure;
• stove "Stolbyanka";
• Swedish stove construction.

The most common is Swedish. To lay out a stove structure according to this option, an ordering diagram is required, given in many thematic articles on the Internet. In these materials, the following masonry details are painted step by step:

• how the roundness of the catch of the structure is maintained in separate rows;
• how vertical overlap is organized at the seams in each of them;
• on which row are the windows for the plates and the functional niches of the stove;
• where it starts and how the chimney outlet is laid out and other points.

After acquaintance with these materials, it will be possible to proceed directly to the masonry work.

The nuances of brickwork

To obtain an even oven masonry along the entire perimeter with fixing the position of the initial rows, cords are suspended from the outside, attached at several points on the floor and ceiling. Then they move on to the step-by-step calculation of all subsequent rows, the evenness of which depends on the following factors:

• the correct application of the solution to the work surface and distribution over it;
• the accuracy of the laying of individual brick samples;
• observance of the gap in the joints and in the aisle.

In the process of laying, special attention is paid to the overlap of adjacent layers, in which the joints of each next row are displaced by about half of the brick relative to the previous one.

Fire safety

When constructing brick ovens, the following fire safety measures must be observed:

• if there are wooden partitions in the place of laying, the minimum distance from them to the furnace is 130 millimeters;
• the recommended direction of wall insulation is from the side of the groove;
• the distance of the chimney from the partitions is at least 250 millimeters.

When implementing the latter requirement, it is allowed to insulate the walls by means of additional brickwork.