Still sick. Ugh.
Made this for a local upcoming burn. Someone posted this bullshit to a forum for campers. I just want to grab the original author by the lapels and shake them into whiplash, screaming “DID YOU FAIL BASIC SCIENCE IN HIGH SCHOOL???” No. No, you cannot heat a room or a tent with a fucking candle. I don’t care how many fucking flower pots you pile on that candle. A candle still has a BTU output somewhere around the range of my fucking armpit.
I love winter camping. Been doing it since my childhood. But making a heat source in your goddamn tent from a live candle is just asking for tragedy. If it’s cold, your first, best bet? MULTIPLE BODIES. Mel and I have one of these. 40 degrees? Pshaw. This is a toasty way to maintain heat at night, well below that. If it’s supposed to get really cold while you’re camping, throw a comforter over it. This isn’t a double entendre, or a sexy-times joke: if you want to stay warm, put more than one body in your bag. Humans are exothermic. You’ll be fine in mild winter climes.
Trying to make a bullshit heater out of a candle a couple flower pots is a recipe for disaster.
Forewarning: this comic will not be included in any book anthologies of FTF. I used stock art.
First random thought after reading the comic was “Build a man a fire, and he’s warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life!”
Try the comforter underneath the sleeping bag instead of on top…more cold seeps in from ground contact, particularly if using an air mattress.
TOO FUNNY! This was the first thing I thought too! LOL
Even better. Go to Toys R Us and get those baby room mats with the alphabet on them(12″x12″ squares). Use that for your tent flooring. Two will cover my whole large tent floor. It’s also fun because you can spell stuff out on the floor :D. Yes, I can be easily amused, why do you ask?
We fixed the majority of our camping woes with rather simple tricks. Our tent was cold, so we slept in the same bag. Still too cold, so we bring our four legged self moving heater(pitbull brand)
Just buy some of those foot/hand heaters and some socks.
Put the heater in the sock and surround your body in them.
You are now toasty and/or cozy as a mother-fucker.
Actually, you can heat a house with a candle. But all your insulation has to be aerogel. So it’s really unworkable, unless you’re stupidly rich and have nothing better to spend your money on.
A candle will keep your snow cave above 0. I don’t know that it does any good at temperatures higher than that
So will your breath. A snow cave’s natural temp is exactly 32 degrees in the interior.
Indeed, any well-insulated space will hit – or generally exceed – freezing, just from your body heat.
Used to do the “Operation Icicle” camps when I was a Scout, and learned that you don’t need a fancy tent, or indeed, anything but the clothes on your back, to stay warm. Just need to know how to make a wind-proof shelter. Water-proof helps, but isn’t strictly necessary, so long as you can keep the incoming water to a minimum.
A selection of downed branches and leaf litter will provide pretty much all the shelter you need, and can be assembled by anyone with basic motor skills and a bit of knowlege.
A candle has a fairly noticeable effect in a snow cave (I grew up in northern Michigan, we used them all the time), but it also eats up the oxygen faster than than it flows in unless you make a big enough hole … which lets more heat out. It becomes a self-defeating thing.
And yes, dumbass kid me did experiment with a snow cave that had no hole, a candle, and holding my breath. The candle choked out in about a minute.
The first submersible used in combat, commonly known as the Turtle, seems to have been briefly tested using a candle for illumination. As I recall, it made the air unbreathable in about 5 minutes. Bushnell instead used foxfire on the compass and depth gauge, and a human operating the vessel (constant vigorous exercise) had an endurance around 30 minutes submerged.
Candles consume oxygen surprisingly quickly.
We have, on occasion, resorted to heating the tent with a camping stove watched very carefully. But that was in the Scottish Highlands with several inches of snow on the ground 😛 Not normally a smart move, but when you’ve been camping since you were a kid, you know when you can ignore the rulebook!
Lets see him do that with a can stove.
Indeed, humans put out ~120W of heat. Far more than a candle.
Most people are idiots when it comes to keeping warm. I live in New York City and during this particularly brutal blast of icy weather I see people bundled up to their noses. Quite literally. They have heavy coats, gloves and scarves, but not a goddamn hat. Morons.
A good hat, good pair of gloves, and a good pair of boots – those are the key. Oh, and a wind barrier of some kind.
I shovel snow in a flannel over-shirt, most times. My neighbors look at me like I’m a freak. But really, I usually have to open the shirt a bit to keep from overheating.
You can heat the cab of a Silvarado covered in 8″-10″ of snow sufficiently to survive sleeping in there with a Coleman lantern even with the window left down far enough to keep you from asphyxiating.
KIDS, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU ARE DESPERATE, HOMELESS, HAVE NO OTHER OPTION, …AND SO DEPRESSED YOU NO LONGER CARE IF YOU ASPHYXIATE OR NOT!!! TRUCK WINDOW WAS OPEN 10″ AND A TARP WAS ARRANGED IN SUCH A MANNER THAT MY HEAD HAD DIRECT ACCESS TO OUTSIDE AIR WHILE LANTERN HEATED PORTION OF CAB WAS BLOCKED AWAY AND SEPARATELY VENTILATED BY SLIDING BACK GLASS LEFT OPEN 2′!!!
…that being said, it worked all winter that year….you can also stick hot-dogs through the lantern’s hanging ring and cook them.
Do not sleep in a sleeping bag with your face covered. The moisture from your breath will cause condensation inside the bag and will make you colder in the long run.
a good sub-zero bag with a GOOD ground pad would keep you even toastier.
i’m a fan of Big Agnes bags and pad systems. went camping this summer in the mountains and temps dropped to near-freezing, and i was uncomfortably-warm. when they say the bag’s good for -15, they’re not kidding around.
I’m having fun with getting cranked up for Frostburn.
Great debunk in the comments by one Brian R VanOosten from Hamilton, Ontario. It’s worth quoting fulltext, so here goes:
(You can translate from the Canadian yourselves :D)
Neat idea to use a flower pot as a dissipator/regulator for the heat, but the idea of using this as a heat source (apart from emergencies) is just silly.
A tea light contains about 550kJ of energy. The IKEA Canada website indicates that 100 “GLIMMA” tea lights cost $4.51 after tax. The whole pack of 100 will have 55MJ of energy. This equates to 12.2MJ per dollar.
Now let’s look at a more conventional heating mechanism: home heating oil. One litre of home heating oil contains 36MJ and at current Canadian market rates costs about $1.20. This equates to 30MJ per dollar.
Now that we’ve addressed the silly implied claim of cost-effectiveness, let’s move on to the equally silly claim of sustainability, shall we?
Please note that paraffin (candle) wax is a petroleum product just like gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, jet fuel, etc.
Perhaps if the author wasn’t using normal candles, but in fact kept a very large number of beehives on his boat, he could be harvesting the bees’ wax. This might be construed as sustainable, but before we jump to that conclusion, let’s run a few more numbers.
According to Statistics Canada, a single person’s dwelling consumes about 70GJ per year. Let’s assume in Canada that half is for heating. Let’s assume again that this boat-dweller is extra thrifty with energy and uses only half again as much for heating. This is about 18GJ required for heating his floating abode. I’ll be generous and not account for the extra heating costs in an exposed marine environment.
Since this “true activist” is using making “sustainable” choices, we must assume he’s harvesting bees’ wax from the hives on board his vessel.
Since bees’ wax has about 44kJ per gram, he will need to harvest 410kg of bees’ wax per year to keep himself warm.
According to my recent reading, the annual harvest per hive is about 22lbs of honey and about 1lb of wax after rendering. Dropping our archaic units and redundant data, we’re looking at about 500g of wax per hive.
The author above (and presumed role model) must then be tending 800+ hives in order to archive this much-vaunted sustainability.
While that sounds very nice, I think there’s a very good reason why this is not a wide-spread home heating practice.
science! (and math)
Oooh! Burn!
😀
Yeah, we have a pair of cold-rated bags that zip together. When it gets cold out, we’ll throw a fleece blanket over the air mattress, conjoined bags on top of that, and another blanket over the top. I wear a knit hat over my shaved melon and we stay quite comfy all snuggled up together in that cocoon.
TMD : Nice reply. I used to teach extreme survival skills to Scouts, and once took on a dare by said scouts to “survive with just what is on you” for a night. I slept in a snowdrift. You better believe that I didn’t lift a finger for the rest of that weekend, and had hot coffee in my hand any time that I wanted it.
There is nothing that beats “insulation on you, insulation under you” for staying alive. I live close to Hamilton, ON, and almost got frozen out of my home a few weeks ago with the ice storm. No power, no heat for 4 days (some people were down for 10 days). My wife has two university degrees and she tried this “heat the house” with flower pots and candles. I came home from work to find her huddled beside her mini-furnace, under a quilt, sitting on the raw concrete of the basement. >_< She was shivering, trying to heat a 1700 sq. foot house with candles and flower pots.
My solution? "C'mon, let's go to the pub"… and then we returned, cooked a nice hot meal on the fondue set and got nice and warm under quilts. …and then I realized that the hot water tank was still warm. Plan B: Fill the bathtub with hot water, and let it radiate. It was cool inside (10C\50F), but we managed to keep the pipes from freezing…
Scouting is good for learning things… Like not sitting on bare concrete when trying to stay warm. 😉
I like your change in plans – Practical, effective, and snugglesome.
I agree the heading of a house with candles is a bit of a stretch. But there are valid reasons to pack or carry a candle in your winter kit in the car or in your Pack when camping as they are good for giving a bit of heat to start a bigger fire or even to give some light, meager though it is. They used to tell you to carry a couple in the car in winter incase you were stranded in the snow/cold as it would be enough to keep you from freezing to death if you had a blanket, sleeping bag, and or coats.
I have used one of the votive type candles to heat the cab of a truck before, and while you might not be able to warm up if you were really chilled or was wet before getting in there, it is enough to heat the cab of a truck or small car above freezing quite well. Then again it was mainly enough to keep the chill from entering the jackets I was wearing, not enough to make it actually warm and balmy in the truck where I’d want to take off the jacket or get out of the blankets.
tea-light versus armpit? Stop! Google time!
Damn, there are a lot of results about this heat-plume dispersal thingy.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18338/is-this-tealight-flowerpot-heater-more-efficient-than-just-tealights
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?97274-How-much-heat-does-the-human-body-produce
Candle (type?): 262.7 BTU/h
Sleeping human: 257.768344 BTU/h
Two differences: firstly, the human is in the sleeping bag with you, not outside it; secondly, the human won’t burn your tent to a scrap of shrivelled black plastic in a single second if you nudge it.
Unless—spontaneous human combustion! 😉
Or unless redhead, and you irritate them.
winter camping in north florida, about 15 years ago. and it got down to 13 degrees in camp…so we took our 4 person family and my bestie’s 5 person family AND their catahoula hound and arranged us all in her 6 man tent. two air mattresses layered with comforter, sheet, 2 comforters on top (two adults on each of those). king sized comforters on the floor, kids in sleeping bags, then comforters layered on top of them, the dog burrowed in between the two air mattresses.
there was a tarp under the tent and one above. and we all were fairly comfortable overnight, and shocked at how cold it had really gotten!
See, I just do winter camping in the Arizona Desert. That saves me tea lights for cooking scorpions 😀
Open flame + synthetic fabric = genius. Enjoy the 3rd degree burns kiddies
I feel for you on the sickness, jlgrant. I started the New Year with the flu (had it on NYE, passed out about 2100, spent most of NYD sleeping) and started to feel better this Monday. Then an ear infection. And now a head cold.
I’m in the same boat as you…I don’t get seriously sick that often. Occasionally I’ll catch the cold bug going around, it may have me sniffling for a day or two, but I’m never incapacitated. This is some whole new level of dirt-dragging.
But that’s why we have benadryl and ibuprofen, eh, comrade?
Grant I know about the darn chest cold I had it Christmas day and it did not end until after the new year. I swear I had 4 fucking colds in two weeks it was just completely wrong and nasty. Every 4 or 6 years there is some nasty chest cold that comes and takes me down. Only thing that helps is mom’s chicken soup. You have to or actually better someone else has to make the soup since you are sick, but store bought soup sucks because there is no garlic in it. Now, do not go all medieval and eat a ton of garlic because then your Wife will hate me because of your nasty stinky feet breath. Drink a ton of liquid the only way is to flush the garbage out. Drink more than 8 glasses of water. Unless, your kidneys do not work correctly than see your doctor because that is a bigger problem than a nasty cold.