About our bricks
Our brickyard produces hand-made ceramic full brick. The bricks from Kraśnik differ significantly from the more common machine-made bricks.
First of all, as a direct product of human hands, bricks differ from one another in shape and colour - in our production we don't use any pigments to unify the colours of bricks and since human hands don't operate as a machine, subtle differences are inevitable.
We don't also use any additives to increase plasticity (plasticizers), because loam from Kraśnik is very homogeneous and even if a minor deviation in its plasticity appears, it is splendidly adjusted by the worker moulding it - machines cannot do that.
The production begins with extracting the resource, namely the loessic loam. Loessic material is another thing that makes our brick different from machine-made brick which is mainly made from clay.
Loess in 70 per cent consists of fine granules of quartz brought with the wind to the present Lubelska Upland from desert areas of East Asia thousands of years ago. Loessic loam contains relatively few clayey ingredients (fluxes), owing to which fact our bricks naturally obtain the porous structure after burning. Walls constructed with such bricks stabilize humidity conditions in the room because they can store the excess moisture and emit it when the need arises, as well as carry away some part of moisture outside the building, if the thermal insulation layer contains materials which pass water vapour.
The production cycle in our brickyard is long because loam extracted from a deposit must lay at least during one winter (seasoning) for it to gain the best properties possible. Only after this period of time and after being thoroughly mixed can the loam be formed into bricks with the use of wooden forms. Every brick has a distinctive imprint - indentation with the symbol of the manufacturer along with coded production date.
After drying, bricks are placed in chambers of our Hoffman kiln and burnt in a traditional way. Burning means obtaining a temperature of up to 1050°C in chambers with bricks and maintaining it for a period of 36 hours.
After being burnt and chilled, bricks are taken out of the kiln and sorted. In a traditional production process the obtained material is highly diversified and must be sorted. The bricks that didn't completely undergo the process of burning (underburned bricks) should always be separated - these bricks are rejected, because they are weak and are not suitable for use in construction.
Separated are also bricks that were subjected to too high temperature, i.e. so called clinker bricks (visible in the above photograph). Those bricks are extremely strong (strength class - 20 and more) and have low absorbability, so they are suitable for building of foundations. Their disadvantage are deformations caused by a high temperature - bricklaying with clinker bricks is more difficult (it's hardly possible to make even joints). In case of some of our customers this flaw turns into an advantage, especially when the customer wants to achieve the effect of a rough, warped brick with irregular mortar. Such a wall is also very durable.
After such selection we obtain the major product, i.e. a mixed brick, the colour of which varies from orange to cherry. This brick has strength class from the range 7.5 - 15.
Regarding the colour, the brick can be further sorted into three categories: cherry (class 15), dark orange (class 10) and orange (class 7.5). The brick classified in this way is often used for beautiful, non-plastered facades. The charm of a facade made of hand-made brick from Kraśnik cannot be compared to anything. The same facade build with equal, machine-made clinker bricks often looks simply unnaturally, whereas the facade made with our bricks lives and changes depending on the glancing angle of sunlight and the distance, from which it is observed.
To sum up, we would like to list five advantages of walls built with our bricks, which should be taken into consideration while choosing materials for Your house:
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A wall built with bricks from Kraśnik has a great thermal capacity.
Thanks to that walls give us desired chill in the summer, averaging daily and even weekly temperatures. During winter a heated house will keep warm long after deactivating of the heat source, which is important for example in the case of heating by means of a chimney or a stove without an automatic fuel dosage. The house reacts more slowly to abrupt temperature drops, giving us more time for reaction. In the case of electric heating, a solid brick house can partially or completely replace expensive accumulation stoves due to high thermal capacity of walls, depending on the quality of the house's insulation: one can use simple, small and inexpensive electric radiators, which are activated during periods of cheaper energy. Significant is also the fact that the house is chilling more slowly in case of emergency interruption in energy supply.
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Walls built with bricks from Kraśnik can "breathe".
Owing to their porous structure, walls made of our bricks can absorb as much water as 15% of their weight. Some part of moisture collected in this way can be removed to the outside the building, another part can be taken to the inside if humidity drops. This soothes abrupt humidity jumps in the house.
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Walls built with bricks from Kraśnik are durable and resistant.
Thanks to high resistance to compression, our bricks can be used for construction of several-storey buildings. Walls are durable and it is not so easy to damage them. You use them to hang heavy shelves, washbowls, cupboards or fix stairs without any problems. A potential housebreaker will not choose a brick wall as the weakest point of the house, so it is still reasonable to secure windows and doors.
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Facade made of bricks from Kraśnik is both strong and beautiful.
Our bricks look naturally on facades. When neatly jointed, they will be adding charm to your house for many years. Our bricks have a homogenous structure. Therefore they do not have the problem with scaling off the surface layer and hence will always look aesthetically. Moreover, there is no need to worry that the facade may be damaged - the brick is an extremely durable material, so children playing football, a branch punching by gusty wind or a ladder leaned against the wall will not do any harm to it.
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Walls built with bricks from Kraśnik are not expensive.
Our price list will convince you that hand-made bricks from Kraśnik are not more expensive than other construction materials of similar quality and performance, even if costs of transport are taken into account. In return you get an original product which has been tested over many hundreds of years.