How to brick a stove in a bath

Recommendation points

• Choice of bricks and binder
• Preparation of the base, walls
• Furnace placement: option with a remote firebox
• Screen masonry
• Blind and open casing
• Joining, cleaning

The brick screen of the stove has an advantageously high heat storage capacity and provides additional protection against burns. To impose a bath stove on your own is not a particularly difficult task. We have prepared for you a detailed guide on the choice of materials and masonry technique.

Choice of bricks and binder

The brick screen of the stove is not only protective, but also decorative. Therefore, it is clearly not worth taking on the masonry everything that comes to hand – it is better to pay attention to the selection of materials, even if it involves additional costs.

Brick, for example, must be solid – the screen must accumulate heat well and quickly. True, it is still better to refuse lining chamotte grades PB or SHA: there is little sense of their refractory properties, and the type is not particularly pretentious. Well, since the density of the brick must be moderately high so that the masonry has time to warm up, the best option is a red clay oven brick of the M-200 brand.

0Facing series of such bricks includes a number of special products designed for masonry with high aesthetic value. Using corner bricks together with ordinary ones, as well as chipped, corrugated and profiled bricks, you can achieve a high individuality in the look of your heater. Naturally, the layout scheme will have to be thought out in advance, to calculate the required amount of stone from it. You need to take with a margin of about 5–8% for rejection and battle, while sorting, tap the bricks with a hammer: the sonorous sound of a blow indicates a minimum content of pores and microcracks.

The binder in the screen cover is a mixture of MSh-18 fireclay mortar and TsPS. The mortar is mixed with river sand in equal parts and soaked for 2-3 days. Cement 400 acts as a setting accelerator; it is added immediately before laying in an amount of 1/4 of the volume of the dry mixture of mortar and sand. To give the masonry a more sophisticated look, the solution can be tinted with chalk, red lead, ocher or soot..

Preparation of the base, walls

The most suitable moment for the construction of the screen is when the steam room is not yet separated from the dressing room by a partition. Another option is that the partition has already been erected, but in the lower part there is an opening for the furnace tunnel. However, if the firebox is facing inside the steam room, you can cover the stove at any convenient time..

A much more important point is the preparation of the base for laying. Due to its significant dead weight, the heater requires a concrete pedestal, but it is not always cast with an additional outlet on the sides. The brick screen is not particularly heavy, but it definitely needs to be given solidity. Therefore, if the protrusion of the pedestal under the stove is less than 160 mm, a casting of a strap is required.

In some cases, it is allowed to cast a reinforced concrete product directly on the floor by erecting an external formwork around the perimeter of the furnace. Even a wooden floor with a sufficiently solid device is capable of withstanding 300-350 kg of distributed load. The tape should be cast almost close to the furnace body 50–60 mm wider than brick, that is, about 170–180 mm. The minimum belt height is limited by protective layers of concrete, for a room it is about 25 mm above and below, that is, 50 mm in total, plus the thickness of the reinforcement. It is better to reinforce with steel, for example, an 8 mm profile bar A500C in three rows with an indent of 40-50 mm.

The heater can be located close to one or two walls. In this case, the screen is laid out adjacent, but the oven is usually not protected from the walls with masonry. If the cladding in these places is made with a flammable material, for example, wooden clapboard, it is better to immediately cut it off one meter above the furnace. A variant with shielding thermal insulation made of sheet metal and magnesite or asbestos gasket under it is also possible.

Furnace placement: option with a remote firebox

In the absence of a remote furnace hatch, the stove can be in any convenient position, which is usually determined by the location of the chimney. If the distance to the walls is less than 200 mm, the stove is not lined on all sides or limited to quarters of rubble. For larger indents, it is recommended to lay out the casing on all sides.

If the stove has a remote firebox, it is better to install and cover it when the steam room is not yet separated by a partition, or in the partition, prepare in advance an opening 30–40 cm higher than the stove. The basic rules for the placement and orientation of the cabinet in relation to the opening can be found in most of the installation instructions supplied with the heaters..

Often, the stove is installed with the front wall of the body in the same plane as the wall of the steam room. If the furnace hatch protrudes above the wall plane from the back side, the furnace is shifted back or the tunnel is cut. It is absolutely impossible to install the stove partially in the section of the wall..

Screen masonry

The lining of the stove is made in half a brick with a bandage between the rows of at least a third of the length. As practice shows, this is the most aesthetic option, besides, it is much easier to form loopholes for air intake. Before laying, stones must be soaked for 4-5 hours..

The first row of the screen must be laid out solid. It is recommended to start with “cheeks” – places adjacent to the neck of the firebox. So it is quite easy to reach the desired value of the gap between the screen and the stove body, which in the optimal version is 40–60 mm. You may need to trim stones, you will also determine its size at the fitting stage.

When one or two bricks are laid perpendicular to the neck of the firebox on each side, the walls of the screen are laid across them. You should start from the front of the oven, making a small protrusion above the cheeks. When installing a remote firebox, the ends of the walls of the screen are laid out flush with the plane of the wall or with a small protrusion.

To make the masonry look beautiful, you should immediately normalize the thickness of the seams. For brick lining of the oven, the optimal value is 6–8 mm. The easiest way to align the seams is to lay two calibrated rods of the required thickness along the edges of the row, immediately forming a fillet joint. It is only important that before removing the rods, the seam has time to settle for about 15 minutes.

From the second row, ventilation gaps can be formed. If you have chosen a dressing in a third of the length, in order to leave a window in the masonry, it is enough to cut off a half addition and lay it instead of a whole brick – so a vertical seam is guaranteed not to form above the hole.

After the walls of the screen are laid out, the front part is laid. Depending on the massiveness of the neck of the firebox, bricks can be laid either directly on it or on a steel corner bar. First, you need to pave the neck from the bottom, here it can be convenient to put a brick on an edge.

Blind and open casing

You need to understand the thermal physics of the heater, take into account its power and design features. Too small a gap leads to overheating due to insufficient convection, the metal quickly gets tired, the masonry collapses from cyclic overheating. A gap of more than 70 mm is ineffective: thermal radiation will not be enough to warm up the screen, and it will lose its accumulating effect.

It is also important whether you are going to leave the gap between the oven and the screen open. A sufficiently powerful convection flow will be created in the free space, which is good when the steam room has a high ceiling and a significant volume. If you lay the gap on top with large stones, leveling them with the laying of the heater itself, the air flow will be limited, and the screen will give more comfortable direct radiation.

In the latter case, the screen should be laid out 1–2 rows above the furnace body. Also, do not forget about the undesirability of overheating: if, with an open gap, two loopholes are enough on one side of the furnace just for air intake, then the closed screen should be more ventilated. It is recommended to make 2-3 rows of holes at different heights.

Joining, cleaning

After completing the laying, the screen must be left to dry for a week. At this time, the oven can be weakly heated up to very weak heating of the side walls, no more. When the clay in the solution finally releases moisture, the screen can be considered complete and you can start bathing procedures.

However, the appearance of such a screen is inconspicuous, therefore, from the first day of drying, the masonry is washed and embroidered. There are two main options for making a brick shell look aesthetically pleasing. The first is to let the masonry dry completely, and then sand the visible surfaces with an emery stone, removing the tarnished brick layer and highlighting the colored veins of the seams.

The second option is to use a jointing knife and rail the next day after the laying is completed. When the seams are summed up, they are allowed to harden for several days and then the remnants of the mortar are cleaned from the brick with a metal brush, or the protruding stones are polished. Both options look impressive when tinted sandy white to graphite seams.