Free Pizza Oven Fuel calculator with clear step-by-step results.
Preheating a masonry pizza oven burns fuel at nearly twice the rate of the cooking phase, because the whole thermal mass has to be brought up to temperature. Splitting the two phases is what makes the cost per pizza meaningful - it falls sharply the more pizzas a single preheat serves.
Fuel used
kg = preheat rate x preheat hours + cooking rate x cooking hours
Cost per pizza
Cost = total fuel kg x price per kg / pizzas cooked
The preheat is a fixed cost. Cooking four pizzas after a 45-minute preheat carries the same firing cost as cooking twenty, so batch size dominates the economics.
Substantially. Wood above 20% moisture spends energy boiling water instead of heating the oven, easily increasing consumption by a third and producing far more smoke.