Northern Ireland Outdoors Forum - Hiking, camping and more
General => General Chat => Topic started by: admin on March 06, 2014
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Not specifically outdoors related but interesting nonetheless for those of us that like to monkey around with stuff.
http://www.lovemoney.com/news/household-bills/gas-and-electricity/23220/how-im-heating-my-house-for-8p-a-day
Basicaly it's a way to heat a room with a few tealights, bread tray and a couple of terracotta post. I've no idea how effective it is but it looks fun to test.
As a freelance journalist who works at home, keeping warm is a big issue. Previous winters have taught me that having the heating on full blast all day means eye-watering heating bills. And as I spend most of the day in my home office, rather than the rest of my flat, a one-room solution seemed perfect.
I found I had all the components of the DIY heater already. You need a bread tin, four tea-light candles and two ceramic flowerpots.
Winter’s video shows how the tea-lights are put inside a bread tin, lit and covered with a small upside-down flowerpot. If the flowerpot has a hole in its base, this is covered up (Winter used the metal casing leftover from one of the tealights).
The small flowerpot is covered by a second, larger pot and the hole in the bigger flowerpot is left uncovered.
"Between the flowerpot and your computer, they keep the room warm," explained Winter. "It costs just 8p a day, plus the cost of electricity (for the computer) of course."
I set up the heater in under five minutes – and waited for the room, the coldest in my flat, to heat up.
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Tried this one a couple of months back after watching that exact video. to say it "heats" is somewhat speculative, sure they give off heat but you need to have good levels of wall and glass insulation or it gets lost just as fast as it gets made.
The biggest issue with them is directing the heat, because each one puts out so little heat you will spend more in reflecting systems than simply setting up a third or fourth in a different part of the room.
Finally comes the candle issue, yes this chap got cheap packs of 100 candles but I say nothing I could buy near me at a street store that kept costs down which meant looking online and even the best ebay deal still didn't seem that good.
The overall concept is great and if you were to spend some time and effort building something like this into the structure of your house then sure they work great but the ones with pots like this really don't do much for anything larger than a coat cupboard.