Hello friends!
I'll share with you my experience building a clay pot heater.
The experiment took place yesterday although it has been delayed for quite a while. In fact I thought about this last Winter.
About a year ago I found the following video teaching how to do a clay pot heater
I bookmarked it and I did a little research. It was clear to me that is not like an air conditioner but It could work on a small scale. Besides being fun to assemble, with some imagination it can also become a decoration piece for your home. I won't fill the post with links because you can easily find tons of them just by searching by "clay pot heater", "candle heater", etc. but see this one I think it's beautiful.
Having a free fire source in the house might be dangerous so please be cautious. And keep in mind the oxygen is being consumed and other gases are being released. Heating is good but intoxicating is bad.
So here is my experiment!
I used a clay plate, candles and cork stoppers.
I placed a clay pot (without hole)
and a bigger a clay pot (with hole) on top.
Results:
In about 1 hour the pots were very hot, warm air was being expelled through the hole and heating the surroundings. The candles lasted for 4 hours and the pots kept warm for a while. It wasn't like summer arriving to the office but I could understand it works.
Possible improvements:
I'll try with bigger candles to achieve even better results. The pot material and production method is likely to influence the outcome as well. We always call them clay or terracota pots but most of them available are industrially produced and not even similar to those handmade (old-school pottery) using material with great % of clay.
Conclusions:
It worked fine although it's not going to keep me warm until springtime. It's a fun experiment I recommend.
Improvements are possible (some can be found online).
Worst case scenario? Turn the pots the right way and plant something!
I hope you enjoyed!
RMach