Does a heater using candles and flower pots really work?

Factual Questions
1

Recently, there seems to be a large number of youtube videos claiming that people can heat a small room almost for free using some flower pots and candles (aka tea lights).

There are several different methods shown by different people.

I am skeptical of this surge of videos. I am doubtful they really work as advertised.

There is a company that sells a product for $40. You can find their web page if you Google “imdb kandle heeter”.

I’m skeptical for a number of reasons.

First some of the youtube videos that appear to be created by private people refer to this product and lavish fantastic praise upon it and try to get you to buy some.

Second, I have purchased a number of various candles and flower pots and nuts and long bolts and washers and I tried several of the various methods shown on youtube with only tiny improvements in the heat produced.

The fact that I have so far failed is not proof positive these things don’t work because I am not very handy and I could easily fail even though these things really do work.

One of the videos was made by someone who showed a bunch of physics formulae that he said proved you would need hundreds of candles to increase the temperature of a room by even a small amount for a 24 hour period. If you are comfortable with physics formulas and the laws of thermodynamics, you might want to look into that.

The two basic methods I have tried are as follows:

  1. First method is to use a long bolt and bolt together two pots and put them over the top of some candles.

  2. Second method is to use a small pot and cover the hole at the bottom with tin foil so only a limited amount of heat escapes through the hole. Then use a much larger pot and leave the hole alone so that the heat escapes through the hole in the bottom of the pot. Of course when I say “bottom of the pot”, that means the top of the device because as you will see if you look at some videos, you put the pots upside down over top of the candles.

Here are a sample of some of these videos:

Method using bolt, nuts and washers:

Method with no bolt:
http://lifehacker.com/use-candles-and-flower-pots-to-heat-a-small-room-more-
e-1497786449

British man uses no bolt:

Physics guy who claims these things can’t really work very well and offers some Physics formulae as proof

My question is:

Are these methods really possible? Specifically, can they heat a small room for only a tiny fraction of the cost of using a modern electric heater?

2

Oops. You don’t need to include the term “imdb” in google searches. That is a mistake. You may want to use “youtube” instead.

3

No. The science video is correct. There is just not enough energy in the Tea lights to do much heating, and such low- temperature burning is inefficient anyhow. Plus the whole thing is unsafe.

4

My intuition tells me that you are correct.

Thing is … there are so many videos from seemingly diff people who say they have gotten this thing to work.

Would it really be worth the money for a company selling this device for $40 to recruit all these people to falsely claim this thing works wonder for them?

My main interest is emergency heating in the event of a power failure.

I have trouble believing there are hundreds of thousands of people who would jump to buy one of these products when their goal is just to reduce the cost of heating one room.

Besides, most of these videos show people how to do it for themselves and are not trying to sell this $40 product.

So, I am curious why would so many people upload these videos to promote this method? To my mind, it just doesn’t add up.

Would anyone have any explanation for this?

5

Explanation? People don’t do math.

Anyway, let’s give this a real treatment. Does it save money?

You can get 120 tealights at Amazon for $15. You use 2 at a time, and they last 4 hours, so you get 30 days worth of heating, if you run it 8 hours a day. This costs $0.50 per day.

You can choose to get a 500 watt space heater instead. Run that 8 hours a day, you use 4000 Watt-Hours, or 4KWh. Average price of a KWh is $0.12, total cost per day $0.48.

Think this fire hazard puts out more heat than a 500 Watt space heater? I’ve read estimates that candles put out between 50-100 watts each, so chances are… no.

6

I appreciate the math you did. But I wonder about the claims they make that these things work better than ordinary candles because they trap the heat and spread it out in the room in a way that candles couldn’t do.

But I really don’t want to argue with your results because I just don’t know hardly anything about the underlying facts.

However the one most important issue to me has to do with the fact of a power failure.

Having lived through a two day power failure near the end of December, the possibility of having a way to heat my bedroom (or maybe even the largest closet in my apartment) would be worth just about any price.

Anyone who has never lived through a power failure during the winter (and an extremely cold winter at that) just can’t appreciate the terrible consequences of living without any heat.

Some people near my city actually lived without any electricity for 10 to 14 days. I was near my wits end without any power for two days. I just can’t imagine what it would be like to try and live without power for much longer than that.

If it ever happens again, I think I would just head out to a hotel. I don’t care about the cost. Any price would be worth paying. Most of the hotels in this area are a minimum of $100 per night and I would grab a room in the event of another power failure.

So, if I could find a method that would really heat an apartment - even just a little - so that I didn’t have to fear freezing to death, I would be willing to buy enough components to create many of these machines - not only for myself - but also for my neighbors.

I live in a highrise with many elderly people and I’m confident that if we ever had another power failure during winter (which is when they are most likely), I could probably get the service agency that cares for my elderly neighbors to reimburse me if I could put these things into their apartments. But that is not really important. If I could help the one hundred seniors avoid the horrors of a power failure similar to the one we had, I would be happy to spend a few hundred dollars now to prefent that. The money is really no problem at all compared to making these people live through freezing conditions for more than a day or so.

In other words, I have no idea whether you are correct about the costs of these things as compared to an electric space heater. But although most people would be interested in getting one or more of these built because they hope to save money, I would do it just to have some insurance against freezing in another power failure.

I appreciate that I did ask about whether these things were cost effective because I believe that is what interests most people. But I can’t help but think that some people are like me and are interested in acquiring some insurance against any future power failures. I’d like to buy a few of these things with enough candles to last for at least two weeks. But I first need to test them and be sure they work.

I thank you for doing the math as to the cost of using these things. Your math certainly appears to make sense to me.

7

I guess I need to add another question as follows:

Do these things actually work - regardless of the cost - and put out enough heat to keep people from freezing during a power failure in winter?

Will they put out enough heat to keep the temperature of a room above say 50 degrees Fahrenheit? I figure that is the minimum temperature that people can stand wearing several layers of clothing and still not freeze to death in their apartments. But if I’m wrong about that, I’d still like to know if they could work well enough to keep an apartment (or a room) above a minimum temperature so the occupants won’t freeze to death.

8

Of course they work, especially if you huddle around and hold your extremities over the flame.

Human can survive below 50F easy, warm blooded mammals you know.

Can a small flame keep you from getting frostbite or freezing to death? YES!

9

Why would you “freeze to death” at 50 Fahrenheit? I bet there are a good many people whose bedrooms are that cool at night.

A candle will give out the same amount of heat, whatever you put around it. Think about it - it won’t burn hotter because it’s got a flowerpot over it.

I do know that this was a way of keeping the frost from greenhouses though. The flowerpot was really just to keep the candle from blowing out I think.

10

The chances of you freezing to death are way lower than the chances that someone is going to die in a fire if a bunch of people use these things to heat their apartments.

11

And there are videos explaining how perpetual motion machines work, how 9/11 was an inside job, etc.

12

Yes. The internet has a rich vein of bullshit running right through it.

13

Also videos, some pretty slick, showing weekend “craft” projects like opening up 9 volt batteries to use the AA’s inside and save money, and others that simply won’t work at all. I think their goal is just to fool the unwary and get video hits; they certainly don’t benefit monetarily.

14

It may burn more completely if enclosed - these little tealight candles are usually presented in a small metal foil cup - if you burn them in the open in a cold room, the heat escapes from the vicinity of the candle quickly and the wick often burns down a channel in the centre, leaving a doughnut shaped piece of unburnt wax.

If you enclose them in a pot, the locally retained heat may melt all of the wax in the foil cup and cause the candle to burn its entire supply of wax.

None of this makes them a good or effective way to heat a room, of course.

15

PP3 9V batteries do in fact contain 6 internal 1.5v cells - in some cases, these are close to AAAA size (yes, AAAA), in others, they are cells made in a custom rectangular shape to fit the casing.

16

Some years ago when I was living in Maine a breathless news story was published about a local handyman who was heating his whole house with a repurposed washing machine. The guy had replaced the outer basket with a tub that had no holes in it, and the agitator with an inner tub, ditto. The half inch or so space between the two was filled with oil which was then made warmer through shear heating caused by the agitator motor moving the inner tub back and forth. There might have been a blower on top to move the warmed air, I don’t remember.

I just didn’t see how there was any advantage in heating oil by stirring it up over just running the juice through resistance grids and sure enough, after a reporter with more physics under his belt visited the guy, a correction was issued. He was indeed heating his whole house — one room at a time. He’d have it on in the bedroom, which was made adequately warm, then trundle the rather large thing into the kitchen and heat that while he made lunch, but the bedroom got cold. Ditto for the parlor, while he watched TV there, but the kitchen would get cold.

I have a survival candle consisting of several ounces of paraffin in a flat can, kind of like a car wax tin, with three “portable” wicks. They’re very stiff and not imbedded in the wax but are shaped with a small circle that segues into a standing up part, like a coiled snake ready to strike. The idea is you light one two, or all three of the wicks, spacing them around the tin with a pair of supplied tweezers as needed to keep a small space, like a tent, car interior, or a closet, warm enough to survive. You are warned that, as with any candle, do not let it burn unattended.

17

How do they benefit from getting video hits and why would they bother to set up a fake project that doesn’t work?

I can understand why some people create videos that purport to prove that 911 was some kind of “inside job”. These people seemed to have a grudge against the US president or the US party in power at the time. It is not just as simple as saying they are mentally imbalanced.

But I can’t see any reason why so many people would all try to put over a hoax on most everyone if they are not gaining anything monetarily from it.

It might be possible they have some relationship with the company that manufactures that $40 product and get some kind of kickback from the sale of these things. But if they don’t get any kind of kickback, then I just can’t understand why they would waste their time trying to make people believe these candle heaters actually work.

18

Why do virus writers (the old, original kind, before they went commercial) do what they do? They get nothing but chuckles from the havoc they cause. That’s sufficient for some.

There certainly is a benefit from getting video hits. Youtube pays uploaders by the hit if this feature is enabled. Youtube gives posters with more hits more privileges and more money. Ever see an ad on YouTube? Someone is getting paid for your eyeballs and your clicks whether the video is valuable or bogus.

19

And some 9v batts have flat, stacked cells. I haven’t seen the video I was thinking about recently, but there was one that purported to have usable (AAAA is not very usable) AA or AAAs – I forget which. It showed an experimenter opening up a 9 v batt and putting the smaller ones in a radio. Easy to do in edit. Besides, I doubt if you’d save much money even if you could find AAs inside, and that was the gist of the video. It was designed to get eyeballs, not spread truth.

20

I don’t know if I saw the fake 9V one or not (it sounds vaguely familiar–but you can fit AAAAs in a radio that takes AAAs with a little finagling), but I do remember this fake 6v hack video from a few years ago.