My wife was telling me the other day that one of her friends has a husband with a real flatulence problem. Evidently, the guy just cuts loose at night when he’s sleeping, and fouls up their bedroom. My wife was telling me that her friend deals with this problem by lighting candles in the room, which, supposedly, burn off the methane and “cleans” up the air.
Has anyone ever heard of something like this? It seems rather incredulous to me that a couple of candle flames would be able to clean the foul smell out of the air.
Wouldn’t that work by masking with another smell rather than by burning off?
I have found striking a match quite effective at making air in badly ventilated toilets more agreeable. That works quickly, surely more quickly that the time it would take for a lot of air to pass the flame.
Farts are methane, basically, and they are flammable. So my WAG would be that a candle would burn off the fart particles in the air. I had roommates who would keep a canlde or two on top of the toilet, just in case.
Also there is a popular collequism (spelling?) that is basically “(when you’re finished in there) Light a match!”
Methane is odorless, so even if you burned it with candles (which is doubtful) it wouldn’t do much to improve the smell. Lighting a match in a bathroom apré merde just disguises the fart smell with the more pungent odor of burning sulphur.
WAG - fire burns off methane which helps release chemical bonds of other substances that give farts their odor? Less the methane, the odor dissipates faster.
My son, being the American Teen Male that he is, thinks farts are hilarious entertainment, so I have become quite the expert. Candles do nothing, lighting and immediately extinguishing a match works wonders. Of course, if you don’t like the odor of struck matches this won’t help. And, like Road Rash pointed out, sleeping with lit candles is foolhardy.
Oops. left out this thought: If the effectiveness of lighting anything was due to it “burning off” the methane, wouldn’t this only work if the fart and the flame were in immediate proximity?
Won’t the methane only burn if it’s concentration is between the lower and upper explosive or flammable limits… ~5%-15% by volume with air? The smelly part you’d actually want to burn off is some sort of sulfer compound, like H2S, which also has an LEL and UEL of 4%-44%.
If the bathroom air volume is 10 cubic meters (~6.5 X 6.5 X 8 feet), that’d mean you’d have to have a volume of something like 0.4-4.4 cubic meters of H2S, which is 400-4,400 L of gas in the bathroom. If that 4% volume were H2S, you’d have a concentration of 40,000 ppm in the air. According to the H2S course I just took, you only need 700-1000 ppm (0.07-0.1%) to immediatley render a person unconscious and kill them. So it seems you’ll be killed by the amount of gas required for it to burn in air long before you’ll be able to light the candle. You can smell this gas at concentrations of 0.0001% by volume though… so there’s not near as much gas present as you may think.
This page says the average person produces about 1/2 L of total “gas” per day (it ain’t all the flammable stuff either)… so unless I’ve made an error here you’d need to have at least 800 people dispense their entire day’s contribution in that bathroom in order for the candle to burn the gas - assuming you let it mix and evenly distribute through the air in that room… otherwise you’d have to have your ignition source a few inches away at the “moment of release” in order for the gas concentration to be high enough to be flammable. This all sounds quite off… have I made a mistake here somewhere, or is the whole concept of burning off fart gas with a candle (rather than simply masking the odour) a steaming load?
Of course the sulphurous smell of matches stinks. But the smoldering tip is an effective antifart device. So why not—duh employ a smoldering tip that smells good?
Further googling will find that Le Petomane could blow out candles 2 feet away from him. That he outsold contemporary actors and comedians has something to be said for him.
I would guess that those limits represent the range in which methane would be able to sustain burning, all by itself. In other words, the individual molecules would be close enough together so that the heat released from the oxidation of some of them would encourage the oxidation of their neighbors. And the high-end of the range would signify the point where there’s not enough oxygen.
If the methane concentration is just 1%, I can’t imagine that a single methane molecule which finds itself inside a flame produced by a candle won’t burn. It just won’t be able to also ignite its closest neighbor, however far away it might be. Given enough time and a huge candle, however, and it’ll eventually burn all the methane in the room.
