Blender: Simple Fire Simulation took way too long to get right

This fire is for the next part of my StarGate fan series.

I called this video A Study in Fire because I must have rendered this thing 100 times before I got it right. I followed several tutorials and created fires just like in the tutorials. But when I tried to adapt it to my scene, BOOM! It blew up. Flames were too slow. Flames were too small. Flames were too big. Too much smoke. No smoke, but a shadow of smoke. This frustrated me more than anything before in blender.

Then I started from scratch. I had to make a change and render. If it worked, go forward. If it didn’t, go back. Change, render. Change, render. Change, render. Until I finally got it right.

This is the scene. The flames are big enough and fast enough. There’s no smoke and you can see through the fire when you are supposed to.