>$1 A Day Cheap Home/Room Convection Heater

[vacationtime247]

Thought this was pretty neat. Decided to build one. For $20, it can't be beat. The local dollar store has 16 tea cup candles for $1. Should cut heating cost significantly and cost just pennies a day. Thought I'd share.
2 Bricks cut in half, on top of a ceramic base with 2 ceramic flower vases (one inside the other) held together with a 1/2 bolt, washer and nuts. 3-4 tea cup candles.
VT247

[Ryland]

Do the math, running 2 100 watt light bulbs for 8 hours per day will produce the same heat and at my rates cost me 17 cents per day, 8 candles per day at 16 for $1 is $0.50 per day, even if you buy them 100 at a time it's still more expensive then what we think of as expensive (electric) heat!

For $20 you can buy a medical heat pad, 50 watts and it will heat whatever you want till it's hot, sit on it, put your feet on it, set it on your lap or back and it costs a fraction of heating with candles, pretty much anything is cheaper then heating with candles!

[brucey]

I like to have my space heaters multi-task:



In all honesty, when this thing is running it's equal to a small electric heater as far as output.

[RobertISaar]

> indeed.

not that this looks like a good resource at all for specs, but:

KanHeetMain

supposedly, 50 BTU/hr from 4.25oz of wax and will last up to 24 hours. the candles you're using look significantly smaller than that.

to create the same amount of heat from an electric source, you would need to consume....... 15 watts of energy for the same time period.

if you burned all 16 at once, you would have a combined output of ~1,600 BTUs. this is the equivalent of ~470 watts of electric heat. if you burned through 1 bag a day, the break-even cost compared to electric is that you would have to be spending just under 9 cents/KWH for electricity. this isn't a bad rate for electric, considering i get nailed for 13.3 cents/KWH, but this is also assuming a 4.25oz candle burning with 100% efficiency. those look like the versions that last around 4 hours, so now you need 6 times as many to keep 24 hours of output. so now, 6X9 = 54 cents/KWh just to break even.



never trust facebook science. ALWAYS do the numbers yourself.

[AntiochOG]

Also you probably don't want to be breathing in all that burnt wax all day long.

[sheepdog 44]

Like how Benjamin Franklin would heat his room with roasted walnuts?

[RobertISaar]

also, calculated oxygen consumption:

4,800 liters of air per hour will essentially be drained of its oxygen for all 16 to be burning. air is roughly 20% oxygen, so ~960 liters of oxygen consumed per hour.

in a tightly sealed house, this seems like a good recipe for carbon monoxide poisoning(or at least oxygen deprivation), which i can assure you, is not fun. waking up on the ground outside of your garage is something that tends to stick with you.

[larrybuck]

People talk about the air being polluted these days, but I have been in a room where
the person wanted multiple candles going at once, and that didn't seem pleasant
to my lungs. I would imagine inside air quality pretty poor back through history!

[larrybuck]

In the recent past, I found that sitting near an unshaded 60 watt light bulb
actually did a decent job of warming where I was.

As the industry looks to do away with these old time bulbs, there are bargains to
be found.

It is ALWAYS nice when you find something that can do double duty.
The guru back in the day (Chapman) at Lotus cars was famous for that!

[vacationtime247]

This is still a work in progress. Word is there are rolling blackouts at times here in NorCal. If and when the power goes out, I'll need something to heat with. Don't really want to add a propane heater. This should at least keep the chill at bay.
As for the candles, I've found generic Crisco tubs of soybean oil is a lot cheaper. Went with small glass cup candles instead. Fill up the used glass candles with with the soybean oil, thread 100% cotton yarn through a straw and push it to the bottom for a wick. They last a lot longer and don't have a bad smell either.