Keeping Pizza Ovens On All Night?

N

NJPizza

New member
I am fairly new to the industry and have a question regarding keeping the pizza ovens on 24hrs.

We have Bakers Pride ovens and we keep the ovens running 24hrs @ 525 degrees.

The reasoning we were told not to turn them off or down is it would take to long for the ovens to heat up the stone.

Question is how long would it take for the stone to heat back up to that temp and would any damage result to the stone cooling and heating every day?

Also what would be an optimal temp be to turn the ovens down to overnight so it would only take about an hour to heat up in morning?

Any insight on what you guys do would be great…Thx!
 
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We have Bakers Pride ovens as well and we just turn them down to their lowest setting each night. When we arrive we simply turn it back up to 525 and in 30 minutes we can bake. Obviously, we are wasting energy but we found if we COMPETLEY turned them off at night it would take an hour and a half to be able to cook on.

Hope this helps.
 
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Wow, that must be costing you a pretty penny in utility cost. It only takes about an hour to heat your oven up to baking temperature from cold, so I can’t think of a good reason to keep it on all night. To give you an idea of how much gas you’re wasting, think of this, the new Middleby WOW ovens have a sensor that allows the heat to be turned down when there are no pizzas going into the oven, but as soon as it sees/senses a pizza on the conveyor, it fires right back up again and bakes the pizza at the set temperature. This simple step saves a bundle on the operation cost of this oven. Some report it to be as high as 20% or more as opposed to ovens without this feature. I am not aware of any more deck damage resulting from turning the oven completely off during the nightime hours, than what occurrs when you first fire the oven up (this is when some deck cracking normally occurrs). If the decks continued to crack with continued heating and cooling, most of the decks out there today migh be better described as a gravel bed. George Mills, if you are reading this, wanna weigh in on this too? George has an immense wealth of experience working with many different types of ovens.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Thanks for both of your responses.

And Tom, yes our utilities are thru the roof! This was at the suggestion of our “prior” manager. 😉
 
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We have a total of four ovens (2 sets of y600’s) Our gas bill is around $400 a month. This does not seem like it’s “thru the roof” to me…perhaps I am missing something. Maybe we could save $100 a month in utility cost if we completely turned off the ovens each night perhaps…

Tom: One thing you are not thinking of his the Thermal Couple. We find that by leaving it on “slow burn” at night our Thermal Couples last much longer because they are not being turned on and off.

Hope this helps.
 
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i have a double stack bakers pride. Every night we turn off the top…i can’t remember the last time i turned the bottom off. I have to wait at least an hour and a half to cook in the top. the bottom is enough to get the day started.
 
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Conveyor ovens, turn 'em off. Deck ovens, leave them on - if you cook on the stone, it keeps them clean, too.
 
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I turn off my deck oven every night. It has four decks and it takes 1 minute for every three degrees to heat back up. It is at 330 degrees in the morning so it takes 75 minutes to get back to 555. My gas bill is around $275 each month.

We use it hard every day. Six days a week. My entire menu is baked in this oven.
 
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I wanna bump this topic.

I use Marsal Brick ovens and have always been told (even from my NY days where we used Baker’s Pride ovens) that the amount of energy it takes to initially heat the oven is so much that it comes close to equaling what it would take to keep them at their running temp.

I get to the pizzeria about 60 minutes before we open and begin to use the ovens about 30 minutes before we open. That only leaves me about 30 minuets for the ovens to heat up. I had to get there early one day, so I lowered them to 300 degrees the night before, and even over an hour later the bricks weren’t hot enough yet to properly cook the bottom of the pies
 
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The real cost is not going to be the gas . . . but the AC spent cooling the place while that huge honking furnace heats it up. At least in my shop, that is what we are looking at with some seriousness.
 
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NYFLPizza:
…the amount of energy it takes to initially heat the oven is so much that it comes close to equaling what it would take to keep them at their running temp…
Click to expand...
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NicksPizza:
The real cost is not going to be the gas . . . but the AC spent cooling the place while that huge honking furnace heats it up.
Click to expand...
This would be a great idea for an PMQ article.

Compare all the costs of running ovens (at various temperatures) overnight. Also look into the cost of purchasing an automatic oven starter + wear & tear on thermal couples. Perhaps PMQ could save the world of deck-oven users some cold, hard cash with some solid research.

Or… maybe I should post this question on the Mythbusters website? I’d be worth it just to see them blow up a deck oven at the end of the show!
 
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I have read that Bakers Pride offers an automatic oven starter for their ovens, does Marsal? Is there a universal one out there that you can install that would bring your decks up to baking temps 2 hours before opening each day? Seems like this is what everyone needs. Save on gas for the ovens and electricity for the A/C running all the time. Not too mention it should not be that expensive to make an actuated gas value with a timer on it. This item would pay for itself in the first couple of months of use.
 
I just wanted to add… that other post that njpizza asked about…the pizzatimerking product… looks like it might be the answer. Their website has a little bit of info but I sent for additional and pricing. I will post more when it arrives. 😃
 
Thanks for everyone responding as this is all the concerns we are having at our place. The utilities are huge! Oven Heat vs AC is crazy and here in NJ last month, most of the days were pushing 100 degrees outside and we could only get our place cooled to 88 inside! Our customers were sweating and that’s not good!

Air was turned off at night but we then walked in to a sauna in the morning and then the AC worked twice as hard trying to get it cool all day.

So now, turning off the ovens, via this TimerKing or something of the likes, would be the save all as it turns off the heat source at night creating the heat and saving on gas, AC will not have to work as hard overnight and save on electric, and then our ovens are warm when we open in the AM. Plus, there will be an energy rebate.

Seems like a win-win all around, right?
 
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“Not if I don’t get to see a deck oven explode.”

I would agree!

And I also agree this would make an outstanding article since I could not find an answer on it before I posted the question AND that we have others interested in the same thing!

“I have read that Bakers Pride offers an automatic oven starter for their ovens,”

Does anyone have any information of this or use one? Cost?, etc?
 
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I did a little internet searching and it looks like the BP auto starters list for $575 on BP’s price list but sell between $320 and $350 per deck. I thought I had read before that it was a factory installed option only. Anyone know the answer to that one?
 
Hi N3pizza:

You got a lot of good info above. Most of our clients have switched to conveyor ovens and do not have the problem of being slow to heat up.

Some years ago, when many of our clients had deck ovens, most of them cut the oven temperature in half when they closed and cranked them up in the morning. It does not appear that a hot oven in a warm building would take much gas to hold 1/2 operating temp over night.

But I defer to those who use deck ovens .

George Mills
 
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But George the big question is do you have an old broken down deck laying around that Brad and NJ can blow up? 😛
 
Mike asks:

But George the big question is do you have an old broken down deck laying around that Brad and NJ can blow up?

No unfortunately we do not.

We are a bit unique in this industry. We have no warehouse, no reconditioning shop.

We found years ago that we were bringing in lots of inventory, paying shipping costs( not an insignificant cost) and then shipping to our clients ( often right back past the source) and paying more shipping costs in addition to the costs of warehousing product.

We made arrangements with all our manufacturers to ship direct from their factories to our clients.

We also made arrangements with several of the best reconditioners of used equipment to supply our clients direct from their shops.

We now specialize in the lay out and design of food service facilities and ship directly from manufactures and rebuilders to our clients.

Thank you for asking.

George Mills
 
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