If you’re not sure about the health risks, or if you have any other questions about cooling your kiln and your bricks, this is a good place to start.

A couple of years ago, I was working in my garage during a heat wave and discovered that the air conditioner in the house was not working properly. The air conditioner’s condensation drain hose was filled with water and clogged with leaves and twigs. I used a shop vacuum to clear out the drain hose and then used a dryer sheet to dry out the plastic pipe. After doing that, it worked fine for about six months.

Then, one night when I went to bed I noticed that the condensation drain hose had filled up again with water and leaves from the leaves on my deck. I cleared it out again with the shop vacuum and then dried it out with another dryer sheet. The next morning it was back to being clogged again.

I decided: I needed an after cooler for my kiln so that I could put off buying one until later, when hopefully cooler weather would mean fewer leaves on my deck and fewer nights of having to dry out my condensation drain hose.

My first thought was, oh no–the after cooler will end up costing me

The kiln tech I’m thinking of is a large, multi-chambered oven with a cast-iron fire box that heats the air to high temperature. The air travels through various heat exchange elements and is then directed into the fire box that has a cast-iron grate with openings for the firewood to rest on. The grate should be positioned directly over the firewood so as to maximize heat transfer.

The fuel, feedstock, and feedstock additives all react with the oxygen in the air (O2) to produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor (H20). The resulting gases leave the kiln through vents at the top of the unit. These gases can be collected and used many times during firing.

One benefit of using an after cooler is that there are no convective currents in an after cooler, so there’s less risk of melting anything you don’t want to melt. This is especially important when working with hot glass that may melt a lot of resin or fluxes in a normal cooler.

If you have ever worked with glass in an oven without an after cooler, you know how big or small your risk assessment must be if you’re working on a glaze sheet or a window pane. You would have to make sure

A post-cooler is a device that cools the kiln after firing. This can be anything from a simple cardboard box to a complicated contraption with a fan to an elaborate system of pipes and tubes. A post-cooler is nothing more than a way to give the kiln time to cool down. The main benefits are that it’s cheaper than buying an air conditioner, and it allows you to fire your kiln more often without overheating

What is a kiln? It’s a furnace in which you can make glass. In the old days, before the invention of electric lights, the only way to see what you were doing was with a little fire in a chimney. You would build up a fire in your fireplace or stove, throw in some charcoal and coal, watch the flames, add iron ore and limestone and sand, then heat until it melted. Then you’d pour it into molds to make some glass.

The trouble was that the heating took forever, and if there was no wind to carry the smoke away, you could kill yourself on top of your fire. For this reason, people built kilns in a separate building from their dwelling-house.

They also built a kind of shelter for their workers when they were making glass. The glass-maker would gather around him his helpers: his apprentice, his old father who didn’t have to work but enjoyed watching the young ones at it. And he would bring along his wife or mother or girlfriend or whatever. They would all sit around this shelter and look at the fire going on inside the furnace and occasionally poke at it with sticks to make sure it wasn’t getting too hot.

Lately someone has come up with a better idea

Refractory cement is a special kind of concrete that can be used to make kilns and other heating furnaces more resistant to thermal shock damage. It is made from low-expansion, high-friction graphite (that’s what the “Ref” in refractory means), not just ordinary sand.

Many pyroclastic glasses are refractory because they contain small amounts of graphite. If a piece of pyroclastic glass breaks, it might not shatter completely. Sometimes it will break into a bead or two; other times into a thin string of beads. If you have no way to separate the beads from each other, you can’t sell them as pyroclastic glass beads, and you won’t make any money. But if you can separate them out, you will have beads that are exactly the right size and shape for making refractory cement.

Glass is a material that’s very important in ceramics, but it’s not a very good ceramic itself. Therefore, if you’re going to do something with a glass piece, you want to put some kind of ceramic on it. Ceramic tile is what people usually use. The most typical ceramic is the one they use as sewage pipe coverings, stuff like that. It’s called silica sand, which sounds like a wonderful material; it comes in brown and gray and black and white and even pink.

It turns out that silica sand is not so great; it has all kinds of problems. It’s too hard for most cuts of glass, it doesn’t like the heat, and it gets impossible to cut if you use diamond blades because the diamond can abrade the surface instead of cutting through it. Basically, it’s got all these disadvantages compared to glass tile.

There are other kinds of ceramic that work well with glass: porcelain tile tiles, for example. But because porcelain tile tiles have such a high price tag, people have been figuring out ways to get around them by making their own ceramic tiles from cheaper materials.

The first things people did was build molds for casting porcelain tiles out of poured concrete.

Bricks, the bricks that we use to build the buildings and houses of our civilization, are made from clay. Clay is a natural material, and you can get clay from several sources: dirt, rocks, or plants. But for most of recorded history people didn’t have access to all three. They could find dirt, but not rocks or plants. So they had to make do with whatever was available.

Today we can get almost anything we want from dirt, rocks, or plants. We can import almost anything, and many people do:

We can even get bricks from other countries. That’s because in some places people make bricks out of something else: concrete blocks. Concrete blocks don’t weigh as much as bricks, so they don’t hold up as well when you hit them with an axe over and over again. But they don’t break as easily either. And they cost less than half as much as bricks.

Concrete blocks are a great invention: they are cheap and durable. But they don’t have the same look and feel of old-fashioned bricks, so nobody uses them much these days–except in brick factories that make cement from them (not the kind you put on your house to keep it warm).