Doubles the heat.

Buy a disco ball! Why didn't anyone think of this before?

You are not going to heat a room in cold temps with this gizmo, although it provides a slower diffusion of the energy.

A closet, maybe.

I would bet that the average human body provides more heat in a room than one of these.

When it came to heating and cooling,I learned that peoples' body heat is part of the equation in figuring the plans.

when the tables are close to full.

I was going to suggest that inviting a bunch of your friends over to play video games or watch something would work better than the candle radiator!!!

yup

... SYG, but you cannot cheat the laws of physics. Heat is heat. Mechanisms to buffer it or concentrate it might make you feel warmer in a particular spot, but they do not add one BTU of actual heat.

when he sets his apartment on fire.

but even assuming that most are more coordinated, it still won't change the heat output.

I think the idea here is to keep the flame adequately confined. I wouldn't try it, because to make this work the pots have to go over the candle flame, and it doesn't seem to provide any way to isolate the flame if the pots topple over. In every hurricane or storm there are some fires from candles, so it is a real danger.

After all, if the idea is to keep warm by having a bonfire of all your possessions, it would be more efficient and kinder to your neighbors to just schedule it and inform them in advance so they could evacuate and buy marshmallows.

Getting something for nothing has always been an easy sell though

Doing this today!

see you guys in a bit

it seems to me should be excellent heat radiators. I've run a couple of space heaters too, they really run up the electric bill, more than one might realize.

Mini refrigerators.
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Pot-in-a-Pot-Refrigerator

You don't have to use sand - you can used crushed shells or very small foam particles. Just something to fill the space between the two and let the water evaporate slowly.

You have to have low ambient humidity to make it work effectively (with close to the same parameters as for swamp coolers), because evaporation is required.

A very old trick which has been used to keep water cool in hot climates.

You can also use a variation of this basic technique to make a mini-AC unit, which is not bad if you just want a cool breeze to blow on your hot body. You can use a solar-powered fan instead of the electricity-powered one to really save electricity or help with power outages:
http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress3/2014/02/08/simple-clay-pot-air-conditioner/

If you use a pot large enough, you can get quite a bit of cool air, but you don't want the water to evaporate inside a room because it will make it more humid. In a dry climate, you can make a room humidifier with the clay pots.

oil lamps. I had three or four oil lamps (two hung on the walls) and ten candles burning when I was home from work. Even when the temp went down into the twenties (and once into the teens) I did not have to turn on the heat to warm my living room/kitchen combination.

At bedtime, I blew out the flames and scuttled into my bed which was piled high with blankets.

The apartment was newer and very snugly built so that the warm air stayed in. The bonus was that I also used the candles and oil lamps for lighting... And laughed at the power company.

I imagine four or so of those little flower pot heaters strategically placed might nicely warm an average sized, well-insulated room.

Together that adds up to a good sized space heater.

I recently (during a storm/power outage) kept the inside temp in about 900 square feet at 60 or above just by turning a gas oven on at 350 with the door shut. The radiated heat plus the two pilot lights was sufficient. It was in the high twenties outside if I remember correctly, although pretty windy.

But it's a quite well insulated area, which of course you don't get to do anything about when you live in an apartment.

I lived in a 3rd floor apartment in NJ back in the 80s, and I don't remember having to use the heat at all in the winter. My apartment was heated by the poor people below. I hate to think what the ones on the first floor were spending! Of course I paid for being on the third floor in the summer.

In some apartments, inexpensive foam stripping plus plastic film to seal windows and block air flow around doors can do a lot to cut heating bills in the cold.

Just look at the wattage. A typical heater is maybe 1500 watts, which you can think of as being the same amount of power it would take to keep 15 old-fashioned incandescent bulbs lit.

And while I'm at it, I might mention that for rural folk, those old incandescent bulbs were often used as little heaters for purposes such as keeping pipes from freezing.

Today's was just a flat tire on my car.

Hell, I was reading DU (if not posting much) while I was in critical care last week.

more efficient than just having the heat simply rise to the ceiling where you can't feel it."

I could burn a 100w light for 20 hours for 15 cents. A candle doesn't last 20 hours.

A sitting person generates 70 watts.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11282821#post11

Flower pot lampshades would be a better, cheaper, safer idea.

Incandescent light bulbs give off most of their energy as heat, but some of it also goes to producing light and you don't always need both heat and light. In order for them to work as lights, you have to hang them up high, which means the heat is not going to go where you need it.

Kerosene heaters are actually quite cheap to operate for the amount of BTUs you get, but CO production can be a hazard and there is a fire risk, albeit smaller with modern designs. Oil-filled heaters are just about as cheap to operate without all the hassle and hazards, and work great for small to medium sized rooms.

Eat only beans all winter. The resulting "events" will keep you toasty warm!

Yes, inside this 48 year old woman beats the heart of a 12 year old who finds jokes about flatulence funny.

...aside from my bedroom.

It's just so damn cold and I live on the first floor. I just need some heat next to me. $10 is worth a try.

...as a Fire Fighter I need to point out that candles are now the #3 cause of household fires in the USA,
behind Cooking and faulty Heating/Electrical equipment.


Candles passed Smoking as a major source of household fires some years ago.
Never leave burning candles untended.

yeah, I never leave my coffee pot on when I leave my house for a short trip to the store.

Here, it seems there's at least one tragic faulty space heater fire a month.

Not wise to heat this way, period. This sounds like the kind of idea one can sell to the 25% of people who don't know the earth revolves around the sun, the scientific illiterati.

The first thing I thought of too.

This trick does work, and it's just a slight variation on the ancient practice of putting stones into a fire. The fire-heated stones not only act as radiant heat sources themselves, but also cool more slowly and provide a more steady heat than you would otherwise get from a flickering flame.

One important caveat though. A LOT of the dirt cheap clay pottery you find in the major chain stores nowadays is very poorly fired and still contains moisture when you purchase it. If you run out and buy one of these cheap pots, and then apply an open flame to them for an extended period of time, the trapped water can flash to steam and cause the pot to explode. Scorching hot, sharp edged clay pot shards flying through the air can make for an unpleasant day.

If you're going to try this, use a quality pot.

to get quality pot?

I'm sorry, I could not resist. Thank you for the warning, which is certainly good.

I will now crawl away in shame.

I'll bet many a new family started out at footsie under the kotatsu!

My roomie in college was Japanese and had one -- those things are absolutely delicious. My feet were notoriously cold and that kept me warm and comfy.

But I have a hard time believing a candle can warm an entire room...the rocket mass heater will warm a house with a LOT less wood than a wood stove. Part of the idea is that the smoke is kept circulating at the top of a closed chamber (a metal barrel that gets hot enough to boil water), instead of just being vented up through a chimney, where a lot of it is lost. I'm going to be looking into doing this.

I'd also like to build a greenhouse that is heated with a rocket mass heater. With heat and plant lights I could grow year round.

Check out the rocket mass heater at Permie.com

HEre is just a brief intro:

just that the trapped heat is being dispersed lower in the room, which is why it's more effective than just burning a candle. I still don't think it will heat a room. An oil heater is 1500 watts and that isn't enough to heat my place. I use two of them, plus a third different space heater, and it's not enough to keep my place warm...but drafts and heat loss are a big part of my problem. Have you checked your room for ways to avoid heat loss?

this was kind of fun

He cut a 5 gallon air tank off an old compressor in half to do it and says it keeps his garage/workshop almost too warm.

The candle/clay pot heater doesn't retain more heat within the room as the rocket mass heater does. It all goes into the room either way. It does retain and radiate more heat longer, so if you were sitting next to it you would feel more heat. The air is warmed all around the clay pot radius.

The rocket mass heater literally diffuses more heat into the room. It's capturing more heat energy and releasing it into the heated space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater

A candle does not emit a lot of heat, so without the clay pot setup, it mostly goes straight up to the ceiling and you'd never even feel it. 80 watts is also not enough to heat a room...so I really don't believe that it would help much, unless you are sitting right next to it, or maybe surrounded by several of them.

I think someone just wanting to heat a single room would be best served by a 1500 watt heater the diffuses the air lower, like the oil radiator type, or one with a fan that blows it down toward the floor instead of up. And make sure the room is well insulated and air tight. I like the covered oriental table concept too. I use two radiator style heaters, plus one with a fan under my desk, so the heat is trapped around my legs, so with all three heaters going, I'm using 4500 watts constantly during the day (and that is expensive). I night I shut off the fan heater. But I'm trying to heat 900 sq feet with a lot of places where cold air comes in low and hot air escapes up high.

Even using 4500 watts, my small place sometimes drops into the low 40's in extreme weather. I have plenty of free wood to burn, but cannot handle smoke, because of my asthma, so the rocket mass heater would be perfect for me, if I can just figure out a way to incorporate it into my floor plan...I don't have a place to put it. But I'm thinking of how to fix that. Plus it would save on my winter electric bills, which go up almost 400% when it's really cold. And I love the idea of a greenhouse attached to the home, where you vent the excess heat, steam, and CO2 into a room full of plants that can put it to use.

if doable safely with easily available and lower powered electrical devices it might be a good poor man's substitute to current space heaters. those tend to be fire hazards as people don't follow precautions much, and run wattage pretty high that it seems like energy waste.

perhaps if someone could create a semi-translucent ceramic lampshade... the multi-use of light and heat diffuser would be useful.

i also remember about mica heaters that was a slab an inch from the wall and using convection. oh, there it is, called micathermic convections heaters. worth search for online.

probably the safest bet would be to get a ceramic heat bulb like you use for reptiles. It can withstand the heat a lot better than a glass bulb. I have one ceramic heat bulb that is 250 watts. It would be interesting to play with.

It would work, but not put out much heat.

I couldn't build it to spec. ACE had a small pot and a pot 5 times it's size, so I had to go small an smaller. They are, however, large enough to get 4 candles under. The other problem is that it's 24 degrees today, "warm" enough that my rooms are sufficiently heated. I need it to get down to single digits before I go to space heaters. I think we're up to a record smashing 24 days of subzero temps this winter. Both Monday and Tuesday this week were -2. Actually, I'm uncomfortably hot right now. lol

I think I'm going to blow out the candles now and try again another day.

I think my smaller pot is an issue

They are better for your health.

Someone else mentioned a candle flame puts out about 80W, so you'll need several of them for a small room.

IIRC, the human body throws off about 100W of heat on average.

land's end had a sale on polartec tops + i have on 3 plus a turtleneck. for once i have not been cold. the polartecs beat out my heavyweight waffleweave longies. i also made a 5lb sweater i made. i made it thru the worst of the polar vortex w/layers. house too $$$ to keep over 67f.

You would be amazed.

I wear regular cotton socks and then just put on the wool socks over them, as wool socks are a pain to clean. Then slippers for around the house.

Also, I have a wool jacket that is just incredibly warm in these cold temperatures.

One more thing: as a gardener and one most familiar with terracotta pots, I totally agree with what the poster upthread says about cheap pots.

If you have trouble finding good ones in the stores these days, try yard and estate sales.

And finally, a three-cat night is almost as good as a three-dog night.


Cher

get a cheap heating pad to keep under your feet. I have heating pads, throws, blankets and mattress covers all over my house to keep the cats warm. When my feet get cold (I wear slipper socks) I get up and walk around a bit to get the blood moving again.

haven't seen slipper socks

are 100 for a pound so about 2 cents each