Sorry for your opinion but this thing works great. Is it going to heat up your house? No. But there’s a reason that emergency kits in cars in Canada have a candle in it. A simple candle will heat a car overnight in -40 weather and you don’t have to waste your car’s gas while you wait for rescue.
This is the same idea. You can use one of these little radiators to warm up a small space just fine and it won’t blow your breakers. Hold your hands close to the terracotta to warm up the fingers. Use a larger candle for longer burn time. You don’t need a chimney for a candle, but I would recommend soy over petroleum candles as they don’t have the soot problem. But you should be using soy candles inside regardless.
Should you need the space heater, spark it up Electro! But maybe you don’t. I set up one of these in my work area in the garage and the heater stays off.
The key being a small space. A sedan has about 100 cubic feet of passenger space and has a very low ceiling. A candle might help in such a small, sealed space.
As to the inverted terracotta pot, that does nothing to increase the amount of heat given off by the candle, which is fixed by the energy potential of the wax or paraffin, though it likely reduces the convection that takes heated air to the ceiling.
Personally, both space heaters and candles strike me as potential ignition sources to be very careful with. And I’d caution anyone to insure that there are no flammable vapors in places like garages if they plan on using candles or space heaters. It’s gasoline fumes that explode, not the liquid. People underestimate the flammability of the “smell” of gasoline.
All the pictures I’ve seen of melted/scorched power-strips show models that contain built-in overcurrent protection.
I seem to be a magnet for colleagues and family who think it normal to do stuff like run 2 coffeemakers and a kettle for tea water on the same NA 120v circuit at the same time, or vacuum-cleaner and microwave-oven, etc.
So I’ve strategically placed such power-strips where overload can be expected, and have found the overcurrent protection in the ones I’ve used to be reliable - it is much better in an institutional setting - especially on weekends - to need to re-set the local power strip rather than to trip a breaker that is often in a locked panel in a locked room.
I doubt the author’s “blew up” was really an explosion in the conventional sense, and the space-heater power-strip failures I see reported with photos look to me like:
a) high-resistance connections causing excess heat at the plug, (rather than something a good fuse or breaker could remedy) or
b) sacrificial failure of surge MOV devices.
I’ve not been able to determine whether or not the sample photos of melted powerstrips I’ve seen posted had circuit protection or if they had fuses/circuit breakers. I suspect the majority of power strips sold in the US have none.
You bring up a good point about poor connections between the plug and socket, but that is a problem that could just as easily happen in a wall outlet as a power strip, so it isn’t really inherently a power strip problem - well, not in power strips that are competently designed and manufactured, and nothing that is not should be allowed to be sold.
Next time I see people laughing at us Brits being over-cautious with a fuse in every plug, I’ll point them to this thread.
Try an put too much current through an extension lead in the UK? The fuse in the plug of the extension lead will pop, and you won’t die.
I have to say I thought fusing evey plug seemed a bit excessive and inconvenient when I first saw it. But as you point out, it’s actually a really good idea given the alternative.
Well I just don’t know why you’d ever plug your amp into something that isn’t protected, I learned that lesson the first (and only) time I blew a transformer.
