Not sure if all codswallop or not, but it’s on the go in my bathroom as we speak.

[video]http://youtu.be/brHqBcZqNzE[/video]

Interesting, pretty much got all I need to give that a whirl. Not gonna cost owt but some cheap candles to try.

It’s not got me eco fan generating yet.

Fork handles?

nah just one

Might have to try this in the study as the radiator is crap 😀

ooo i’ll give that a go, my office is like an ice box without the heater..

Simplez might try this!

has anyone given this a proper go yet – I don;’t have a plant pot to try it (despite the plethora of plant nurseries round here)?

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/psa-great-small-silly-cheap-to-run-office-heater-for-2quid#post-5512479

right, of to the garden centre, my office is only 1.9 x 1.9 x 4.5m, though single brick and effing cold… currently dying from paraffin fumes..

Quick update, I ran out of fuel for my office heater, so gave this thing a go. It’s cra p to put it lightly.

That video is a lazy mans version. This photo shows how to do it properly.

Due to there being only a few tea lights, you need to leave it a couple of hours before it gets warm. I have yet to find a place where I can buy 3 different sized terracotta pots!

I have tried this in my mancave (6ft x 6ft) shed. There is zero insulation and when I go out in the below zero temperature it is freezing in there. I personally didn’t find it made any difference. The time I tried, I was fixing my bike which usually leads me to swearing at it and me getting hot and bothered. I find me personally was enough to warm the shed up.

I will however move it into the house and try.

I’ll bet you could turn that into a natty lampshade, convecting the heat off a lightbulb – heat and light for even less £ per day

I don’t know if zero insulation made a difference or not.

It doesn’t get massively warm even when I tried putting 6 candles underneath.

Oh and it smells from burning metal bolt and warm terracotta. As well as carbon monoxide poisoning.

Milkie, is there an instruction guide to that thing, how is the convection side of it working with no hole in the top?

8p a day sounds cheap doesn’t it, comapred to your heating bills.

8p/day for ten rooms is 80p/day. 30 days in a month, that’s £24. Given that doens’t include hot water, it doesn’t seem a lot different to my gas CH..?

I think the amount of insulation in the room must make a difference,but I am going to try that in the shed ,as I have loads of terracotta pots.
Not going to bother with the bolt thing though ,will just do a two stage 🙂

It’ll only work in a well insulated room, cos it’s very low power.

Ok, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Can we just agree that it would be amazing if you lived in a small cave and only had access to plant pots and tea lights?

What do you do with the houseplants while you’re using the pots for heating? I found it made a real mess of the carpet.

Ok, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Can we just agree that it would be amazing if you lived in a small cave and only had access to plant pots and tea lights?

ps: you are talking to Molgrips here, the chances of him agreeing with you are a big, fat, zero. HTH 🙂

Lol.. hehe.. well actually if you lived in a small room without gas CH it could be good. My sister in her hippie period knew people with yurts who heated them with a bottle of calor gas and basically a pilot light. They had the flue going into pipes under the floorboards before finally exiting, to extract all the warmth from the flame.

somebody is bound to try this with plastic plant pots!!!!!!!!!

I remember reading this for making the Terracotta Pot Heater

that version with the bolts, the washers are blocking the holes, so how does the air convect through and pick up heat from the hot inner pots?

I saw this and had a think, how can this possibly work?

As the energy from burning 4 tea lights is quite small, no matter how effective at spreading the heat the terracotta pots are, then the whole thing is doomed?

From the above posts it seems to be not very effective.

As someone used to say on a big spaceship at least once per program

You cannae change the laws of physics captain!

The point is that tea lights create a non trivial amount of heat, and if you distribute that effectively then you can heat a room. As long as the heat leaving the room is small enough of course.

It’s also worth noting that the human experience of heat is not the same as actual air temperature. Which is why it can feel warm in the sun when the air temp is 9C and freezing when the sun goes in and the temp is still 9C

I think above people are using it in particularly cold rooms, which generally mean that they are not well insulated, which means they are likely to lose too much heat in the first place.

You can’t extract more enwergy than there was already in a burning tea light, so I fail to see how surrounding it with a terracotta pot will help. That said, I’ve made sure my elderly father has a pack of tea lights and a big disposable foil tray to put them in to light en-masse if his heating fails this winter.

So, if you have a candle, but no pots, does some of the energy released (as radiation (visible light + IR primarily) escape?

no of course not.

PS. a std sized candle (1 candela=12.6lm) seems to burn the mainly paraffin based wax at 2.15996367 × 10-6 kg / sec, equivalent to an average heat output of approximately 80w.

Considering that a decent sized houshold radiator can be in the order of a couple of kW, that suggests you can’t heat you house much with a candle.

(In reality of course, candles aren’t 100% efficient)

So, if you have a candle, but no pots, does some of the energy released (as radiation (visible light + IR primarily) escape?

no of course not.

The hot air rises up to the ceiling. It’ll cool eventually. So it’ll cool by transferring heat to the ceiling, which will then conduct to the upstairs floor or to the walls out of the house. The ceiling will be warmer.

We don’t live on the ceiling in our house.

You can’t extract more enwergy than there was already in a burning tea light, so I fail to see how surrounding it with a terracotta pot will help.

It’s redistributing it, not extracting more.

PS. a std sized candle (1 candela=12.6lm) seems to burn the mainly paraffin based wax at 2.15996367 × 10-6 kg / sec, equivalent to an average heat output of approximately 80w.

That’s about as much as a person at rest. In our new build living room, two people watching telly can make the room warm enough to have to open the door, despite both TRV controlled rads being stone cold. Consumption of the telly is about 80-90W it seems. So similar to about 3-4 candles.

So the maths suggests that the concept is not outrageous.

Watching telly at molgrips house 🙂

Except the pots will also result in convective heating and a hot ceiling.

Need to do the radative sums for the pots at say 150degC compared to the flame directly at 600degC!

Yes but more radiative heat – the area of the pot is massivley larger than the flame.

Fasthaggis – yes that pic is me, floundering in huge quantities of my wife’s homemade scarves…