Search Results for: heat the body

How to heat your cabin with steam?

This is a guest post by Mikhesh The Steamer.

It does not have to be just about the winter regarded with apprehension, which did not prove to be as much problematic in Europe at all. In the outlying hills, there is a lack of electricity or gas source. On the other hand, there is usually water and wood nearby. A steam heater can be assembled from things you find in a garbage dump, thrown away in a workshop or in a hobby market.

In a cabin with a fireplace after thirty minutes, the temperature is at best slightly higher, but with steam heating, a T-shirt is enough for that time. You can also spread the steam behind several corners and you don’t have to rely on heat radiation. Wood consumption is equal to a regular fireplace. The difference is in how we deal with its energy.

[Read more…]

Don’t Heat your Room with Tea Candles

hoax te candle heater

Friends and readers keep sending me links to a “low-tech” heating system in which tea candles heat a combination of ceramic flower pots. It seems you all need a course in thermodynamics, so let’s start with some basics:

1. First law of thermodynamics: you can’t create energy out of nothing, (and you can’t destroy it). This means that placing two ceramic pots on top of four candles does not increase heat production. You get the same amount of heat if you burn four candles without the pots.

2. Now imagine heating your room with four tea candles.

3. Get more tea candles. One tea candle can produce around 30 watts of heat, which means that you need at least 20 to 30 tea candles to heat a very small room (and replace them every 3 to 4 hours).

4. You have now built a small fireplace using tea candles. However, it isn’t running on wood but on petroleum — the stuff paraffin is usually made of. And above all,  you have built a fireplace without a chimney. Chimneyless fireplaces are very efficient, but they’re not so healthy and that’s exactly why the chimney was invented. Connecting your tea candle fireplace to a chimney will solve the indoor air pollution issue, but unfortunately 85-90% of the heat will then escape through the chimney. So you need more candles.

5. Forget tea candles, get some thermal underwear.

Heat Your Desk, Not Your Office

heated desk“Bloooms introduces a desk with a heated top, which is bound to enhance the comfort level of people who spend much time working behind a desk.

Research by the Dutch research institute TNO (Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research) shows that contact heating through the wrists is the most efficient way to warm the body — one can turn down the heater 1 to 4 degrees C°. If the undersides of the wrists are warm, the whole body will be warm. By working at a computer, for example, using the mouse, or writing, the wrists are placed on the work top.

The heating elements are integrated into the table top. This is possible, because Bloooms exclusively works with bamboo, which is eminently suitable to apply heating. It’s a stable material, that conserves its shape and properties when heated. A sensor triggers the heating the moment someone sits down at the desk, and turns it off when no one is sitting at the desk. The heating can be individually adjusted, and is therefore excellently suited to be used in spaces where there are several people at work.”

Bloooms heated desk. The company is working on a new version of their heated desk, which can be controlled by a laptop and will be ready in a few months. Related: Several readers have sent us a link to a prototype of a thermoelectric bracelet. It monitors air and skin temperature, and sends tailored pulses of hot or cold waveforms to the wrist to help maintain thermal comfort. Heat the individual, not the building.

Related articles:

Micro Heaters

Microheaters“In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. By myself. In the past few winters I had conducted experiments in cutting the amount of energy I needed to stay warm, with a focus on heating myself instead of heating the whole house.”

“I had a lot of motivators here, but the primary motivator was the greenwashing being done around fluorescent light bulbs. My power company sent me literature telling me that I should replace all of my incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent light bulbs to save energy and money. Based on my lighting usage, the most I could possibly save is $5 per year. Yet, with changing my heating habits, I think I have proven that I can save $500 per year.”

Read more: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill. Via Treehugger. Previously: Insulation: first the body, then the home.

The Lamp of the Eskimo (1898)

Quoted from: Hough, Walter. The lamp of the Eskimo. US Government Printing Office, 1898.

Though the Eskimo live at a temperature of zero Fahrenheit, travelers have noticed their idiosyncrasy with regard to cold. The clothing is designedly left open at intervals around the waist and the bare skin exposed to the cold air. As a rule the Eskimo strip when in the house and sleep naked. Another indication of their feverishness is the consumption of great (quantities of ice-cold water. No explorer has failed to notice the Eskimo lamp, around which the whole domestic life of this people seems to focus. Far more remarkable than being the unique possessors of the lamp in the Western Hemisphere, the Eskimo presents the spectacle of a people depending for their very existence upon this household belonging. Indeed, it is a startling conclusion that the lamp has determined the occupancy of an otherwise uninhabitable region by the Eskimo, or, in other words, the distribution of a race. [Read more…]

Forgotten Clothing: Hip Scarves

Hip Scarves. Image by Marie Verdeil.

Last year my partner stumbled upon a fascinating piece of clothing in a second-hand shop in Donostia, Basque Country. It looks like a miniskirt but is a (unisex) piece of underwear that increases thermal comfort in winter.

The clothing piece comes by different names: hip warmer, hip hugger, hip scarf, waist scarf, back warmer, belly warmer, tummy band, core warmer, warming belt, thermal brace — the list goes on. It is known as a “Haramaki” or “belly wrap” in Japan.

My hip warmers come in different sizes and are made from 69% wool, 22% cotton, and 9% elastodiene. Judging by the packaging design, they date from the 1970s or early 1980s. [Read more…]