Kristine Lofgren Egloo heats your room without electricity for 10 cents a day
Can you heat your room for just 10 cents a day? Egloo can. Egloo is a clever little heater that harnesses candle power to heat a room without wasting electricity. Egloo works by concentrating the heat from the flame of a few candles inside a terracotta dome, radiating warmth into a room even after the candles are blown out. The concept was developed by Marco Zagaria, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and right now, he is looking for funding for the brilliant little heater. The project is being funded through Indiegogo where you can get in on the project and start heating your office, dorm or bedroom without using electricity.
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This is cute, but ridiculous. Standard paraffin candles are made of petroleum based wax. Instead of using electricity you are burning an extremely expensive version of processed crude oil. The cost per BTU delivered must be astounding.
Besides, if you just burned the candles in the open air the mass of objects in the room would absorb the heat just as well as a clay dome. The sheetrock in your walls is actually a good heat sink.
Suggestion: Take the money you would have spent on this and buy tubes of caulk and cans of spray foam. Seal up the cracks in your house where you can feel the cold air coming in. It will last for decades and save you a lot more money and carbon emissions than a glorified candelabra.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but energy science is my job.
Yes, I’ve seen various types of this pop up all over the Internet in the past week. Most use flower pots. But still, it is way underpowered. I still take nothing I read on the Internet seriously, so I might still have to try it and see it fail since I have everything I need around my house. If I were on Mythbusters, I would use my outdoor fire pit with a big terracotta pot on top. That might be the right size. (But don’t try it at home inside, way too much smoke)
However, I don’t think it would do much if I put this over a burner on my gas stove even. Yes, the kitchen gets a tad bit warmer when I am cooking, but it is nowhere near as efficient as a furnace moving air around the house.
Heating pads will warm you up and only use 50 watts of power or so. You could run one of those for a long time on 10 cents worth of power. And if homes were built better and designed to take into account the Sun, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal either.