Friday, January 24, 2014

Emergency heat!!!

FYI, I did NOT come up with this myself, the original URLs will be provided as attribution.

So you are in your apartment, it's freezing cold, and your heat goes out. For some people the options aren't good. They may not know anyone near by they can stay with, and going to a shelter(if you can even find one) to hang out with strangers isn't very appealing. An alternative is an emergency heater, here are a couple of options.

Coffee can heater

Hello, all! I live in an all-electric city apartment in central Connecticut, and my partner and I (along with hundreds of thousands of others) lost electricity for almost a week after the Halloween blizzard a few weeks back. Of course, I was very well-prepared where things like batteries/lanterns/light and no-cooking-necessary food was concerned, and we had running water, but our main problem was heat: we have no fireplace or wood stove, no kerosene heater or other portable fuel generator (and, quite frankly, due to CO poisoning concerns, I don't WANT one), no electrical generator because we have no outdoor space to set one up.

But I was able to get our apartment up to 66 degrees at night -- even when outdoor temps were in the high 20s -- and I will tell you how I did it: I made makeshift heaters out of coffee cans and metal-cup tealight candles.

It's very easy: take an empty METAL coffee can, make sure the inside is clean and contains no coffee grounds, and rip off the label from the outside (because it is a potential fire hazard). Then, make sure you have some tealight candles, the kind that come in little disposable metal cups. IKEA stores sell bricks of 100 tealight candles for $4; if you're not near an IKEA, you can still find inexpensive tealights in the candle section of pretty much any discount or department store. Each IKEA tealight burns about four hours before running out of wax.

Depending on how cold it was, I put anywhere from four to six tealights in the bottom of each coffee can. The sides of the can would get warm to the touch -- but not hot -- however, the heat coming out the top of the can was hot enough that you could not hold your hand directly above the can's opening without burning yourself.

During the actual blackout I only had three coffee-can heaters; I burned other candles on metal trays and other fireproof surfaces, but tealights in a coffee can seem to generate far more heat than the same number of tealights on, say, a metal or mirrored tray. The coffee can "focuses" the heat, in a way. Since the storm my partner and I have been saving our empty coffee cans -- my ultimate goal is to have an even dozen on hand; as of this morning we have seven -- and after the blackout ended and tings went back to normal, I spent $52 plus tax on 1300 IKEA tealight candles. I figure that would provide two weeks of heat in a situation like the blackout -- freezing nights, but daytime temps above freezing. In a super-cold snap, where temperatures stayed below freezing even during the day, those 1300 candles would provide heat for a week.

Your mileage may vary depending on variables -- how well-insulated is your home, how many cubic feet do you have to heat, etc. For my place, we shut all the bedroom doors and heated only the bathroom and common areas -- roughly 1,000 cubic feet, with thickly insulated walls. And I noticed that burning 40 candles made the interior temperature rise by about 20 degrees. (So, presumably, if it were REALLY cold, 80 candles would raise the temperature by 40 degrees in a thousand-cubic-foot space.)

The coffee cans not only amplify the heat of the candles, but greatly reduce fire hazards: even if you spill wax from a candle, the melted wax will stay in the metal can. And, since the candles are made of vegetable wax, there's no danger of CO emissions (though the smell when you extinguish 30 or 40 such candles at once is, I confess, not very nice. I had to take the battery out of the smoke detector before I blew out the candles, then put the battery back after the smoke dissipated.)

Ad, of course, some standard safety guidelines: DO NOT leave candles burning when you are asleep, or not home. DO NOT keep an active coffee-can heater near paper or anything else flammable. Set the cans on non-flammable surfaces: metal stovetop, metal washer/dryer top, etc. I took the rotating glass dish from off my microwave carousel, which was big enough to hold two cans.
- Last Edit: December 04, 2011, 06:04:34 PM by Jennifer -

You can also make one from a flower pot.