Can I speed up my kiln’s cooling cycle?
How can I speed up my kiln’s cooling cycle?
Question: “What can we do to make big kilns cool down faster? Keep the door slightly open at a certain temperature?”
There isn’t really a practical way to speed up the cooling cycle. In my free Strategic Glazing class, I shared how the cooling cycle can affect glaze results.
Why the length of your cooling cycle matters
Cooling cycle refers to the length of time that your glazes take to get from their top temperature to where they have solidified, which is around 1400-1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Because crystallization happens during the cooling cycle, the slower your cooling cycle is the more crystallization can happen.
In the class, I shared this green, glossy glaze that I was firing in my home kiln that cooled really quickly. For example, I could reach cone 6 at 10:00 pm and first thing the next morning, I could crack the kiln’s lid open and unload it soon after. But at the Rec Center, we had these really large kilns with thick bricks that took over 24 hours to cool.
Firing this particular glaze in the small kiln would produce a green, glossy glaze with little pink flecks where it was pooling and where it was thinner. But firing in the large kiln (with just a natural cooling cycle, but took longer to cool because it was bigger and had thicker bricks) the glaze turned out completely pink and matte. You could only see a little bit of green where the glaze was pooling in the bowls.
Can I speed up cooling if my kiln cools too slowly?
There isn’t really a safe way to speed up your cooling cycle. I would not recommend cracking the kiln open while it’s really hot. You have to think about your clay body and thermal shock as well. You wouldn’t want a cool draft of room temperature air hitting all of your pots where the temperature is over 1800 degrees.
Could you pull all the peeps out for the cooling cycle? Yes, that would speed it up a little bit but I don’t think it’s really going to make a significant impact on your glaze results. So all you can do is slow down your cooling cycle by programming a slower cool. or getting a smaller kiln that is just going to naturally cool more quickly.
So, unfortunately, we can’t speed it up. We can only slow it down. And we slow it down by programming a cooling cycle that turns the elements back on during the cooling cycle, which slows down the cooling.
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What You Need to Start Mixing Glazes from Scratch
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