How much water could a forge consume in a day?

[Lynea]

I want to get a more specific idea of all the resources a typical medieval forge could use within a day, especially water. In my head, water plays a role but I don't know to what extent.

Can anyone help me understand this field more?

 

[Stevie]

I want to get a more specific idea of all the resources a typical medieval forge could use within a day, especially water. In my head, water plays a role but I don't know to what extent.

Can anyone help me understand this field more?

If we're talking about a forge where you have a blacksmith making tools, equipment and weapons from metal stock by heating it in a forge then working the metal using hand tools, then I think the answer is not very much. Our smith would likely have a tub of water for quenching hot metal, so about a bathful of water would do the job.

The resource they would need in greater quantity would be fuel for the forge. Charcoal was the go-to choice back in the day, cheap and plentiful. How much would a forge use? Depends on the size of the forge and how long it's worked. Charcoal burns for a few hours at forging temperatures, I'd guess, so assuming a 12 hour working day and a forge that takes a sack or two at a time, then maybe four to six sacks per day?

 

[Mad Swede]

I want to get a more specific idea of all the resources a typical medieval forge could use within a day, especially water. In my head, water plays a role but I don't know to what extent.

Can anyone help me understand this field more?

You use water in a forge to quench the pieces of metal that you're working on. For smaller pices you only need a bucket, for larger pieces you'd use a trough of some kind. So an ordinary well would give you enough water for the forge. If you had a waterfall nearby then you might use a small water wheel to drive the bellows for the forge or maybe a large hammer or drill or saw. The real issue is fuel for the forge, to heat and in some cases smelt the ore to get the metal you need. That fuel is usually charcoal or coal, dependning on the local geography and geology.

You need a lot of charcoal. As an example it takes about 40 cubic meters of charcoal to produce a ton of iron. A workshop with several forges would need an almost constant supply of charcoal, and that means access to quite a large area of forest to produce the charcoal. The problem with charcoal is that it is fragile, and if its been crumbled up then it isn't any use as fuel. So transporting charcoal over longer distances is an issue. In winter you'd use sledges, in summer you'd use a boat or pack horse. In all three cases you'd use baskets to carry the charcoal, and you can't transport it much more than 20km before the charcoal crumbles to the point of unusability. Charcoal production takes time, and if your society is agricultural then most charcoal burning will be done in the autumn and early winter after the harvest is in and the fields ploughed.

Coal is better as a fuel, but coal is only an option if its easy to mine or dig out from the ground.

 

[Lynea]

Okay Thanks for the insight. I hadn't really considered the fuel... What do modern forges run on?

 

[Mad Swede]

Okay Thanks for the insight. I hadn't really considered the fuel... What do modern forges run on?

Usually coal or some form of gas. The gas is usually some form of liquified petroleum gas, like propane or butane, but in countries with natural gas (methane) you'd use that.

 

[Qvadrater]

For smaller pices you only need a bucket, for larger pieces you'd use a trough of some kind.

As a minor addendum to this: while you need this much water, you won't consume this much water. The amount of water consumed depends on how large and how hot the metal chunk is, and how much it's cooled in the quenching, but it's unlikely that a single quench would consume the entire bucket/trough.