Is there any concensus on what the most efficient size of charcoal pit is?

[Maelstrom]

Just answering your questions.  You don't have to be snarky about it.

[Dark Thoughts]

I'm not snarky, I'm just explaining the discrepancy of understanding here. You don't have to be offended by it.

[Lemonspray55555]

I had a gut feeling that the deeper the pit the more efficient so I deepened my 2 by 8 pit 10 down at its lowest but at 5 down I added a packed dirt "door" to my basement and the bottom spirals like a stair down. So far I am not sure if I was correct but what I do know is that the resulting charcoal is uneven and sometimes slides and falls disappearing still I get hundreds of charcoal. Maybe someone need only to make a few 11 block test charcoal stair pits.

[Lemonspray55555]

I did some tests with stair case pits, I think it supports my belief that deeper is more efficient but their are outliers.

^ In this image I would note that aside from max depth the deeper areas are most efficiently converted.

^ In the 2 leftmost pits the peak at 2nd most depth lost less than 4 layers of charcoal compared to the shallows left of incomplete pit which consistently halved.

[Dilan Rona]

tried a massive 11x11x11 charcoal pit. with the firepit fire ignited at top. Only 11x11x10 of the wood stacks turned to charcoal, leaving the bottom most wood layer untouched, and unburned.

[Lemonspray55555]

The initial fire place counts as part of the 11*11*11 bounds, also I found out that charcoal flows in this image I set the fire in the bottom and it filled with charcoal so you don't need to place the fire above the firewood e.g

F = firewood X = starting fire.

FFX instead of   X

FFF                  FFF

[Broccoli Clock]

@Lemonspray55555 you get some hearts just for taking this to the extremes!

I was only posing a general question in my first post, but fair play to you for extrapolating and with images too!

[NateDatKat]

Id actually wager to say 2x2s are the least efficient due to the auto waste of 4 firewood for the fire on top, and that being a higher percent to the total of your firewood, would make it a fair bit less efficient per firing then a max 11x11 (I like my 4X4X4 but am going to do a big upgrade to 10x10x10 so I don’t have to fire it up for a long while)