DIY Carbon Felt Heater | Burns Forever Without Changing Out The Wick

hey guys today I'm talking about making a temporary heater for your greenhouse and if you had to in an emergency you could put this in your fireplace or on top of your stove where it's vented around your house or you could vent it out of a window you have the right materials I'm going to show you exactly how to put this together it's super simple and it will heat up super super hot so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take an ordinary mason jar and I'm going to drill a hole directly in the center of the top [Applause] now next I'm going to take a rubber mallet that's seen better days this thing has been used for about a dozen or so years so it's looking kind of rough but I'm going to install this copper Wick holder into our jar top and we've got it really tight so it won't fall down into our fuel now it's very hard to pull in and out and it shouldn't have any problem staying in our jar top and that's where it's going to stay now the next thing we're going to use is plumbers felt and a lot of people probably have never heard of this but plumbers use this when they're welding a piece of pipe and they want to put this behind it to protect something that might catch on fire so they place it behind the pipe and then set their torch onto it and this will not burn it may smoke a little bit burning off a little bit of the fabric or debris it's not actually fabric is actually copper felt so anyways you want to get copper felt that's 100% copper felt and it will last up to it can take temperatures up to 2,000 degrees and this is what we're using as our Wick so guys I'm saying copper felt I'm thinking about this piece of copper here but this is actually carbon felt so forgive me for that but this is actually called carbon felt and it's made out of carbon fiber and it will not burn so this is our safety tray and it's going to be filled with sand and this is going to keep our candle from falling over because I'm going to add sand to the tray and that should hold the candle in place and we're just going to fill it up close to the edge and there's a dual purpose for this sand in that it not only is a safety feature but it also can store Heat this very dry sand I've tried other candles and this is the first time I've a able been able to find a really dry sand so it's perfect for what we're using it for today is a carbon fiber candle okay we're just going to shake this around and smooth the sand out and remove some of the sand from our mason jar lid and the next thing we're going to do is we're going to add our fuel which is and although it looks like gasoline it is not gasoline this is actually canola oil and you can use vegetable oil for this as well so I'm going to fill the jar about halfway and we're going to go on to the next step now the next thing I need to do is I need to cut some of this carbon felt and we need to cut a pretty wide piece of it because our Wick needs to be pretty thick and it needs to fit pretty securely into our copper fitting or our copper piece of pipe so we're just going to cut this in a pretty wide strip and we're going to roll it up once we have it cut and we definitely want it going down into the canola oil as far as it will go I'm just going to keep it's not easy to cut you probably easier to cut this with a razor blade but I'm just wanting to make sure I get the proper depth into the Container all right so we have a small piece of our carbon felt put the rest of it out of the way and I'm going to tightly roll this up and I may have to do a little bit more trimming on it but we just want a very tight roll probably going to need to cut that right there but I just want it to be a tight fit into our P into our copper fitting I'm going to cut this again I'm going to go try to find a razor blade if I can but that's going to be the diameter the thickness of our Wick okay after quite a bit of searching the greenhouse I found a razor blade and I don't think it's exactly the sharpest razor blade I have but let's try this we're going to roll it to about where we know it's going to be a tight fit into the wick I'm going to take our blade and estimate that's where it needs to be and that is a heck of a lot easier piece of advice use a razor blade to cut it because scissors don't want to cut that well so I'm going to roll it again now I'm going to insert it into our piece of copper and this is going to be our Wick let's see I'm hoping you can see that there we're just going to kind of force it down into the copper and it's wanting to unroll itself so I'm just going to try to keep it rolled tightly and maybe do a little bit of twisting action there to get it to go into the piece of copper and we just want maybe quarter of an inch sticking out of the top of this so we're just going to keep pushing it now we've got it coming through and we should be able to pull it from the other side there we go now this carbon felt has an incredible wicking action and it can Wick very heavy oils such as canola oil now that's going to be our Wick top we're going to have this down into the canola oil I'm going to move that back into place and I'm going to add a little bit I'm going to drip a little bit of the canola oil on this and so it'll get started with that wicking action it should take about five minutes to start wicking all I've taken some of the canola oil and I've drenched our Wick in it so it will light properly and that wicking action will take a little while to start so we're going to make our first attempt to light and it's going to burn that first part but the key to this is that copper heating up and having a wicking action because the canola oil is very heavy it's not like kerosene or lighter fluid don't ever use those in this type of candle because it can be very dangerous you only want to use canola or vegetable oil so it's going to take a little while to heat up and start that wicking action and our flame will eventually get a little bit bigger now if you're having a problem getting it lit you can take some rubbing alcohol and drip it on your Wick and light it from there and that will also speed up the process of getting your Wick started which is not going to be instantaneous so you're going to have to just make sure that it's got plenty combustible material in the wick so I've did a little manipulation with the length of the copper I had to go back in and cut another piece of copper and I just started over with another jar but same exact setup and the wick has now started the wicking action from the oil and we're going to let that get really hot and we're going to go on to our next step now two things I want to point out again very clearly is you need to have a carbon monoxide detector and a smoke detector or a combination type that you can buy in the very close proximity to this because you don't want to take any chances on something happen even though this is buried in the sand it's very unlikely it' fall over we may make some modifications that will make it a little bit more likely to follow over but just remember make sure you have those two safety devices close at hand somewhere close to this second thing is when you're burning this you want to put it under a stove vent where it can vent out naturally to the outside or you need to put in something like this an aluminum or steel flexible pipe where you can vent the vapors outside put it next to a window you can make a makeshift hold through the side of the window let the window up a few inches take this outside and then make a cardboard or something around both sides where it can be vented outside safely just in case it is putting out smoke okay so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put this steel stainless steel I believe this was like some type of utensil holder that I got from the kitchen I'm going to put that there and let that heat up okay we're going to do a couple of temperature tests see if I can get that just the right spot where you can see it so we're getting close to 350 Dees 400° just I'm kind of bouncing around there I can't hold it perfectly still but I'm trying to keep it in just the right spot and just remember it does need to be vented in some way whether it's a stove top fireplace wherever you have it you need to make sure it is vented now the next thing I'm going to use is a heat powered fan and a lot of people have seen these if they have a fireplace or wood burning stove but this is actually powered by heat so we're going to make sure that's sitting securely but we're just going to test to see how hot this gets whether it's hot enough to control this fan so guys I wanted to show you the fan in action I wanted to give you a little bit more explanation of this fan in case you've never seen one before this is not a battery powered fan it is not a electric fan it's only powered by heat when the base of it gets hot it has a reaction inside of the motor that runs the air it's not going to put out a massive amount of Breeze but it is going to circulate a little bit of warm air if you have a hoop house a small greenhous it might take two or three of these in my size Greenhouse but just remember that these are really not for a large amount of air flow but it will circulate and prevent frost damage on your seedlings so I removed our fan and I put a piece of painters tape on here because it's a reflective nature to this stainless steel that makes it hard to get a reading and accurate reading so when I put it when I point this at the tape I can get a better reading of the actual temperature and you can see I'm I'm terribly out of focus there but anyways we're looking at bouncing around a little bit there but it looks like it's over 300° so I removed our fan from the Heat and it is still actually going and so the purpose of the fan is just to circulate the air a little bit better no heater would work really that well without some kind of circulation so I'm going to take this off and make sure our flame is still going and yes it's still wicking up and this thing is really hot without a pair of gloves my hands would be burned our painters tape melted a little bit there on top and I can smell it where it melted but I can feel heat not through my gloves but I can feel heat around it and I definitely wouldn't put my hands on it but when we put our fan on there we can definitely feel I can I'm glad I Pi didn't pick this up earlier with my bare hand because it was very hot it's starting to slow down now but once it gets really hot the fan just continues to speed up so it's a great little way to circulate air in a very small area now as you can see I took our Bowl our stainless steel bowl off and now we have it directly over the flame on our utensil holder so that also another thing you can do is if you want to see if it works better you can kind of Tinker around and see which way works better I can definitely feel more air of movement but it doesn't feel like it's quite as warm but with the bowl it felt like the air was a little bit hotter I think because it was trapping the air in this case it's moving the air a little bit faster so maybe that's why it feels a little cooler and also the temperature in the greenhouse is also dropping so guys if you decide to do this use Extreme Caution because when you're dealing with fire and Flame you can have carbon monoxide and smoke so you just want to make sure that you vent vent it properly with some type of metal vent like this or set it on on top of a stove where it can be vented out above the stove or inside of a fireplace if you're not using the fireplace you can just set it back in there and it could generate a little bit of heat so just remember please be careful when you do this because there's a lot of safety factors involved and also probably the most important thing smoke Manar manarin I don't know what a manarin is smoke or carbon monoxide detector make sure you have that in the proximity when you're using this so there's no danger of anyone being hurt so guys if you have any comments please leave them down below and also I really appreciate you watching if you found it interesting please like And subscribe because I'm going to be testing a lot more different a lot different types of greenhouse heaters I want to try quite a few I don't really have anything in my Greenhouse that's overly tender but I definitely don't want it to get below 33 degrees 30 upper 30s 40s will be fine in my Greenhouse but extreme cold down in the 20s and teens which does happen in our area in January and February I want to try to prevent that and I've always had always had have my primary heat source which is a space heater so guys thanks so much for watching and have a great day still going

Channel: Zen Garden Oasis

Views: 440,947

Keywords: diy heater, greenhouse heater, carbon felt wick, carbon felt candle, vegetable oil heating, green house heater, keep greenhouse warm, diy space heater, how to build space heater, diy heater without electricity, diy heat, candle heater

Id: WTWE7yyu-5I

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023