Candles for heating
Save heating costs with a self-made tea light oven?
Can tea lights be used to build a stove that heats the room?
© Christopher Tamcke / Getty Images
It sounds a little too good to be true. With the help of a home-made stove made of tea lights and a few other utensils from the hardware store, it should be possible to heat. This is behind the internet trend.
High energy prices raise an important question: How can you heat sensibly and efficiently in the winter of 2022 without your energy costs getting out of control? Inexpensive alternatives are in demand in view of the coming heating period in winter. The tips include everything from smart heating thermostats to warming wool socks. The following idea moves somewhere in between: Thanks to a DIY tea light oven, rooms should be able to be heated inexpensively. The project can be implemented with just a few items from the hardware store. Lazy people can also get the mini oven on the Internet. But how useful is the tea light oven really?
What is a tea light oven?
With winter approaching, consumers are looking for creative ways to save on heating bills. The tea light oven pretends to be one of them. Due to its construction from different layers of clay pots, the DIY project should be able to store heat from tea lights and thus heat up rooms.
Caution: It is a self-built construction that involves open fire. Therefore, never leave a tea light oven unattended and remember that the improvised oven can get very hot.
Build a tea light oven yourself: Here’s how
For the DIY tea light oven you need:
- 1 large clay potoptionally 2 more small pots
- 2 saucers
- 1 long construction screw/threaded piece M12 (at least 30 cm)
- 4 washers
- 3 hexagon nuts M12
- 1 cap nut M12
- Drill driver with masonry bit 12 mm
There are different ways to build a tea light oven. This gives you the choice of constructing using several clay pots of different sizes or a single pot. As well as the choice of whether you build a construction for the sub-floor from saucers or, for example, bricks.
Choose the first base, drill a hole for the threaded rod in both bases. Take a long construction screw, guide it through the holes and fix it on both sides with a washer and a nut. The following nut with washer acts as a support for the clay pot. Keep a distance of about 20 centimeters from the saucer so that the pot does not get too hot. Fix the pot (or alternatively three pots of different sizes, which you place inside one another) from above with a washer and the cap nut. Place three or four tea lights in the coaster and light them. Place the tea light oven on a suitable heat-resistant surface. Finished.
Instructions for a similar alternative to the tea light oven can be found in this one star-Video:
Does a tea light oven increase the room temperature?
in the RTL self-test the editors use a thermal imaging camera to check to what extent the room temperature increases when using a tea light oven. The result is sobering. Although the heat from the candles stays in the home-made construction, the home-made stove cannot contribute to warming the room temperature. As always with DIY projects, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. However, do not go into your tea light oven experiment with too high expectations.
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