Help understanding firing schedule for older manual kiln

[boardbutproductive]

Hi guys! I recently inherited a small Paragon A-66B manual kiln, which is from the 1970s, I think.  It has a kiln sitter installed, but no timer or pyrometer. It only has one switch, with 4 settings - off, low, medium, high.  It looks like it's in good shape, and we are getting a circuit installed today so we can try to get it up and running! 

If the install goes well, I'm hoping to do a couple test firings this week, but I'm confused on what sort of schedule to follow for this sort of kiln.  I found a firing schedule poster for this kiln model in Paragon's archive, but I have a few questions:  https://216.198.210.227/files/manuals/A-66B-FSP.pdf. 

- I will be firing Bmix clay to ^04 bique and ^6 glaze. Is this poster saying I should follow the third schedule for both?

- This schedule  has you run it on low for 4 hours, then medium for just 1 hour, before switching to high.  That seems disproportionately long for low and short for medium from other schedules I've seen, where it seems they are usually more proportionate to each other.  Should either of these phases be adjusted?

- I've read that a glaze firing can be done faster than a bisque fire, but it looks like if I follow the provided schedule, the glaze fire would actually be longer.  Is that not how it should be? Should I be using a different schedule than what's shown here for glaze firing?

- As I've been researching how to do this, I've found a number of references to "slow," "medium," and "fast" glaze firings, but they all seem to break it down by temperature.  Since I currently have no meter to tell me what the exact temp inside the kiln is, how would I go about adjusting the firing speed in a kiln like this?  Does anyone have schedules or references I could look at?


 

[neilestrick]

Standard firing schedule for a manual kiln is 1 hour on low, 1 hour on medium, high till done. Works fine for both bisque or glaze. If you wanted to speed up the glaze firing you could go 1/2 hour each, but make sure the pots are dry.