Heat Your Room with 1 Candle plus Flowerpots, Nuts and Washers | Permaculture Magazine

Tactical Intelligence |
Wednesday, 20th November 2013

If you want to heat a room with just one candle and save even more money you need to create thermal mass and then radiate it with terracotta pots. It more simple than you could ever imagine.


After a crazy week when half a million people visited our site to check out the video, 'How to Heat Your Room for 8 Pence a Day', we thought you would appreciate a refinement of this idea that generates even more heat from a candle by increasing the thermal mass within the first pot. Please share this page too so that those who saw the first post can also test out this new design.
Putting it all Together

The process for putting together the candle heater is very simple:
What You Need

Some nuts, washers and a bolt plus three flowerpots! Here's the detail.


One 4″ terracotta (not glazed) pot
One 2″ terracotta (not glazed) pot
One 1 1/2″ terracotta (not glazed) pot
Two 1 1/2″ x 1/4″ washers
Three 1 1/4″ x 1/4″ washers
Three 1″ x 1/4″ washers
Eight 3/4″ x 1/4″ washers
Seven 1/4″ nuts
One 3″ x 1/4″ bolt
Assembly Instructions
I think that the easiest way for you to learn how to put one of these heaters together is to follow the cutout image (to the left) I used from the heatstick.com site:




Making the stand

I found the simplest stand to make is to purchase three 4″ corner braces.


Then just put the three braces together with the middle brace facing the opposite direction and bend the outside two just enough to support the heater.

How it Works

The basic purpose of this heater is to capture the heat given from a candle flame and to concentrate it into a steel and ceramic radiator assembly. After some time, the ceramic surface will act as a thermal mass and begin to radiate the captured thermal energy into your room or office. Here's how heatstick.com describes it (image and description c/o heatstick.com):



Heat rising from a burning candle (or electric lamp) is first trapped in the Steel Inner Core and surrounding Ceramic (Terracotta) Inner Module.

The Inner Cores get very hot and radiate heat to the Ceramic Middle Core.

This entire inner region gets VERY VERY HOT! Heat synergistically builds up and 'boils out' of the Terracotta Inner Core into the Ceramic Middle Core. The Middle Core heats up and begins to Radiate Heat. Heated air 'boils out' into theTerracotta Outer Core.

The Large Surface Area of the Outer Core begins receiving Heat. The inner wall surfaces become very HOT! Heat travels through the wall to the Outer Surface.

The Outer Surface gets VERY WARM to HOT and gently begins to Radiate Heat into your home or office.

Cross-posted from: www.tacticalintelligence.net/blog/how-to-make-a-candle-heater.htm

Heat Your Room with 1 Candle plus Flowerpots, Nuts and Washers | Permaculture Magazine