My DIY barrel pizza oven put in a good shift last year but was left all alone through winter with nothing but a plastic bag on the chimney. How did it do? Is it a collapsing rust bucket in spring? Did it spring a leak? What level of maintenance does it need and does it work as well as ever?
May DIY Pizza ovens use perlite or vermiculite cement and age doesn't treat these types of ovens well. Two years life isn't unusual so I wondered how mine had fared after a cold and super wet winter pretty much unprotected.
You will see that cosmetically it has done brilliantly. I Used outdoor waterproof grout, the kind of stuff used in swimming pools, for the tiling and it has done brilliantly. No mould, moss, algae, anything so I'd say that the outside is a real success.
The inside is a little rusty, particularly where I tend to have the hot flame, but is ok and no where near as bad as I feared it would be, so I'm pretty happy. The floor has sunk a bit which will be due to bemusing rock wool and sand, but its not a big deal and doesn't affect use one jot. So a lesson there but not a catastrophic one.
So we heated her up, made some pizzas and then I tried to do a focaccia version 2 as my first attempt was a bit crispy. And voila, a successful Home made pizza oven baked Focaccia. Yum Yum in our tums.