@evileddy: This is really cool! Thanks for creating and sharing! I believe simple inventions like this will save some of us in the upcoming hard times!
Forever Candle by @cahlen on 3Speak
Carbon Felt can be used as a wick in a candle or lantern fueled by vegetable oil which never burns down or needs to be replaced. --- DONATE: CONTACT: SUBSCRIBE: GEAR LIST: NOTICE: --- ▶ Watch on 3s...
Tags: #survival #prepping #diy #offgrid #homesteading #minimalism #life #lifestyle
Hey everyone, Callan here, and in this video, I'm going to talk to you about my experiments with the Forever candle. It's not really forever, it's using vegetable oil, which just wick up and get spent slowly over time, but I'm calling it Forever candle because the wick does not burn down. So the wick is something that absorbs the oil, pulls it up towards the flame, and it's been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years. but the wick does eventually burn until you have to keep replacing the wick, which is an annoying thing. So if you can get it so you don't have to do that, then all you have to do is replace the oil over time, and there's lots of different places that you can get vegetable oil. You know, you can get it from the store for the sheep if you're buying it in bulk, or you can get it from places like restaurants. which, you know, fry things in them for a long period of time, and then they need to throw out the oil, and that's a huge amount of oil that they need to get rid of, so if you're just taking off their hands, you're actually doing them a favor, okay? So, anyways, what this is, is just a glass jar. I think this is a pickle jar. I got it out of the trash. I drilled a hole in the top of the metal lid. It has to be a metal lid that fits the, I think this is one half -inch pipe. It's one half inch diameter copper pipe, and it's two inches long, okay, so it's going about this far down, and then I wrapped the copper felt into a little, like, tuby thing, and I pushed it down inside, left a quarter of an inch poking up, and then, I don't know if you can see, but this, all this black stuff that you see down here, this is just the felt, which comes out of a tube, which only goes down this far, and it's all just here. to soak up the oil. And also there's this stick here, which is holding the tube from falling down in, because I'm still experimenting with this and all different types of tube sizes and things like that. And if I didn't have that, the tube would fall down through this hole and just, you know, extinguish itself. But once I figure out the right size, and I think this is probably the right size, and I would use something called J .B. Weld to basically lock in. So I'd put it around the edges here on the top and the bottom, and it would lock in where the actual copper pipe was fitted. So all I'd have to do is take off this lid and pull the whole thing out and then fill it again with oil, and the tube will come with the lid. Okay, so here's a couple of other experimentations I came up with. This is the first one. This one's basically went up and rested on the bottom of the two of the glass jar and went all the way up, right? So this is the full height of the jar. and it just didn't seem to wick up the oil fast enough, so it would burn for a little while, and then it would go out, okay? So one thing that you need to know about this is the tube getting hot is a key aspect of it, because the tube getting hot is what causes the oil to wick up more quickly, quickly enough so that it's actually continually fueling the flame. But if this is sitting all the way down in the oil, and the oil is not hot, right, in the glass jar, then... this tube is not allowed to get hot even though there's flame here because it's metal and the heat conducts very quickly and so it's just going to spread through the entirety of the tube and the tube's never going to get hot and it's never going to wick fast enough. I did drill holes in it so that it would wick but still that did not go fast enough. This is another experiment I did where I did a little bit shorter and had the bottom of the wick just sticking out a little less than what my final design actually was. So, and also another thing to know is that it can take a long time to light this thing. So if you just have a standard lighter, you're going to have to sit there with this on the top of the wick until it gets hot enough to actually start a little flame. Once the little flames there, it'll keep going, basically indefinitely. But, you know, there's other people who recommend that you use some of those little blow torch lighters, you know, because it'll light it much more quickly, okay? So another thing worth mentioning is that when I was doing the original designs and the experiments with these two things, is I was using olive oil, which does not seem to burn as well as canoil, canola oil. I had olive oil before, and I did not have canola oil, and then I got that later, okay? So it's possible that the canoil oil would work with those longer versions. I just haven't actually tried it yet. Uh, something to know about olive oil. Like I said, it does not seem to burn very well. It seems to eventually go out. Canoa oil burns pretty consistently a big flame. I'd say that the olive oil is maybe a third of this size is more like a regular candle size. But the canola oil has a soot problem, okay? So if you... What I do, I use this to heat my water, and I'll show you that in a second to make my oatmeal. But if I'm putting the stove sitting right here, and this is almost too hot to keep my hand there, okay? It will collect soot, which gets, like, thick, like thick soot within a couple of hours. And also, that soot will get into the actual felt here, the carbon felt, and... you have to, that will cause the flame to go out. And so once that, that takes about six to eight hours before that happens. Once you do that, you just kind of need to take a little knife and, like, brush that stuff off of the wick, and then you can light it again, and it'll be fine, okay? But, because of that soot problem, I mean, you look at this soot, it's very styrofoamy, it's very thick, and you put your hands on it, and you get, you know, I don't know if you can see, my hands are very sooty right now, and this is not very dirty. You know, if you touch this, let's see if you can find it. So here's a piece of that soot. Probably can't see it very well, but, you know, I just barely test it. I'm brushing it off, and my fingers are horribly sooty, right? So it's kind of messy, and I don't really like the idea of that being something that I'm breathing in. Okay, so the reason I'm playing with this is as a possibility of a way to heat the shelter, okay? So I can use it to heat the water. I can use it to put a fire brick on top of, and it will get hot, and it does get hot, okay? It takes a little while, but the fire brick will get hot, and if the door is closed, because of the insulation in this shelter, and the fact of this shelter is very small, it will heat the shelter, okay? But, you know, the smoke is also in the shelter. It's also, it does make carbon monoxide in small amounts, right? So it's not really something I want to be... breathing all the time, especially in such an enclosed space. So I doubt that I'm going to end up using this as my actual heating method. Currently, I'm just using it to heat water for my oatmeal, which I'll show you right now. Okay, so I had this metal bucket that a friend let me borrow, and it's filled with sand, and the sand is basically to hold this thing in place so it doesn't get knocked over and cause a fire or something like that. And then this is a camping stove that comes with my basically water bottle, my titanium water bottle that also comes with this cup. It's a little pot with a lid, and there's just water in there. And I just set it on top of this. And it really doesn't take that long for the water to get hot enough for me to be able to... put my oatmeal in there, and for it to cook within just a couple of minutes. Okay, you can see it's steaming. I've had this on before I started making this video. I've never left it here long enough to get to a boil, but I bet you it could get to a boil if left long enough. Okay, and another thing that you can do as I was talking about is take a fire brick. This thing's probably too heavy, it's going to push it down, but let's see it's pushing it down. You get the idea, though. Just put a firebreak there. This soot is just for me putting it there for that one second, okay? So just to show you that carbon felt wicking material, this is a basically a sheet, I don't know you'd call it, a square, a rectangle of the carbon felt. I don't think it's that expensive. It's used by plumbers and welders to basically protect things where they're doing a weld in a tight spot with things that maybe are flammable, so if you had like a wood wall. and you were doing a weld, you know, you put it back there because this thing, it will not burn. It can get super hot, but nothing will actually happen to it, okay? So this is a really inexpensive way to heat things up. You can even, like I said, use it as a heater if you have a way to vent the fumes, which, you know, might be hard. I could put, if I could find something that I could use as a fume hood. you know, I could put that over, just kind of sitting over the top, so the fumes actually go away. So then I could build, like, maybe a firebrick structure, which vented the fumes up through, you know, kind of like an S shape through multiple firebrick arrangements until it reached the fume hood. That way it would collect all the heat while it was going up. It would store it in the bricks, and it would radiate into the shelter. And then once it exits that, it would just go out to the vent. but it's a little bit elaborate, so, and I don't really have anything, you know, around me right now that I think I could use to make that fume hood, so, but it is an option. I am probably just going to go with propane. I found a nice little outdoor propane burner for like $25, so at this point I just have to find a propane tank, which I can go buy a propane tank, but it's not... A field propane tank is not something I can buy with gift cards or cryptocurrency or anything like that, so I actually have to find a way to get some cash locally before I'll be able to get that. But, you know, even if I'm not able to pull that off before the winter gets really cold, this shelter, especially with the door on now, stays pretty warm in here, even when it's below freezing outside. So I don't think I actually will need heat to survive, but having heat. is nice because, you know, it feels good to be warm, especially when you're coming out of a really cold, wintry day. So, anyways, I just thought I'd show you that, give you some ideas. Do be careful about the fumes. They probably will coat your lungs, and the carbon monoxide could kill you if you're not careful. But it is a pretty small flame, so, you know, you're just going to have to figure out the balance there for yourself. And, you know, also maybe think of some other ways. that you can use this stuff because this stuff's pretty cool, the carbon felt. So, anyways, I hope that's useful to you, and I'll see you guys later.
@evileddy: This is really cool! Thanks for creating and sharing! I believe simple inventions like this will save some of us in the upcoming hard times!