So my church wants to go green in the sanctuary. This means going to an organic oil for burning in our chalice on Sundays. However, no one seems to know where to get the stuff. How about it: does anyone in our number know where to find organic lamp oil?
Do you have a harpoon?
What’s ‘organic lamp oil’. The first thing that comes to mind is whale oil. I’d rather burn petroleum.
Here’s a start: Energy
Lamp oil is kerosene, a light mineral oil (from petroleum, IOW). There’s no “organic” (an idiotic term in itself) alternative. Vegetable oils would smoke horribly and foul the vessel.
I was going to suggest olive oil as well.
Just buy a new lamp wick for the chalice and you should be set. If that doesn’t work experiment a little using the links Squink provided.
alcohol does burn and can be obtained from organic sources. depends on if you can get by with a burning flame that looks like it could be oil or if it must be oil fueled.
Thanks! I’ve tried olive oil in a conventional lamp with little success. Comments on the first link tell me why. Onward and upward.
We had a problem with our oil supply several years back. Some nasties broke in and wrecked the place something awful. All we had was this one little bottle, maybe enough to last a day – and the shipping time was going to about a business week. I have no idea how that little bit of oil lasted as long as it did, but we made it through!
Alcohol flames are almost invisible - not ideal for a lamp that’s presumably meant to emit light…
under low pressure you can adjust to give a bright flame.
That would require some sort of custom-built lamp, wouldn’t it? (if that’s the case, you could make one with an incadescent mantle, heated by the alcohol flame)
Just to follow up, I’ve gotten the conventional lamp to work. The problem with using olive oil over petroleum-based stuff is the capilary action. The olive oil burns fine (better than the conventional stuff, actually), but it won’t draw up the wick steadily enough to keep a flame going to the end of the fuel. I filled the vessel to the absolute brim and I got a strong flame for almost an hour with negligible fuel expended. Since I’ll never need a flame for longer than 90 minutes, I’m declaring victory for these purposes. For more general purposes, Squink’s links are excellent.
Don’t worry, I caught it.
If the objective is to go “green”, it may also help to buy the olive oil in bulk and as locally as possible to minimize environmental costs related to bottling, transportation, and waste.
I use “Firefly Safe & Green Organic Lamp Oil” and it works great 
Pretty much, oil won’t burn without a carbon atom in there, so it’s all organic.
Our method for lamps using pig lard or vegetable oil:
- a shallow clay pot for stability
- a short glass apron to protect the flame from wind but not too high to form a flue where soot will collect
- a floating wick (we use a cork sheet wrapped in foil.) This will keep the wick height constant as the oil is consumed and prevents sooting.
נס גדול היה שם
Now you owe a week’s worth of toys and gifts to everyone reading this thread.
I popped in to suggest olive oil as well, glad to see it already has worked for you =) I was given the cutest little replica of a roman era judean olive oil lamp modeled after one from an archeological dig [a friend taking applied anthropology made it for one of her classes.] I liked it, and have bought myself a couple other little oil lamps, and also a thingy to turn a standard bell jar into an olive oil lamp [mainly because I get a mild frisson out of making olive oil lamps. Who knew you could burn olive oil!]
[one of the main draws to olive oil is it won’t generally flash over if it is spilled … a consideration as my aunt was killed as a result of spilling kerosene while filling several oil lamps and injuring my maternal grandmother severely enough that she subsequently died about 3 years later. Not to mention, most people have a can of olive oil around but probably don’t randomly have kerosene/lamp oil.]