Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Oliver Buckle, post: 217303, member: 12649"] Years ago I heard an old lady in her recollections say they used to put a candle under a flowerpot in the bedroom to keep the ice off the windows when she was a little girl. I tried it with a big terracotta pot and found the pot gets thoroughly warm all over, and I have used it in my greenhouse when there is severe frost ever since, but candles are quite dear, the cheap household ones don't last long enough for overnight so I have always been on the lookout for a cheap oil lamp. Yesterday I found a video on YouTube showing how to make one using a jar with a hole drilled in the lid, a piece of tin can rolled around the drill and then pushed through the hole, and a piece of cotton-wool rolled up for a wick and pushed through the tube. My 'Storyshack' is at the bottom of the garden where I don't have electricity and I have wanted to warm it a bit to keep my books dry so I made a lamp and installed it on the back of my desk with a length of copper pipe from the hole in the flower pot going through the roof (about 30") so I would not be putting all the water from the combustion into the shed. The pipe got really hot at the bottom end and was hand hot where it stuck out the top of the roof, so with the flowerpot plenty of warmth, a bit of extra sophistication I hadn't had with the candle in the greenhouse and this morning all the alcohol had burnt off since yesterday afternoon. I can easily make an appropriate size hole in my plastic greenhouse roof, maybe even two. A heated greenhouse this winter! My daughter phoned me yesterday, she has an upstairs flat with half a garden covered in decking. Last year she grew a good few things I had given her in pots, but now she has plans. She has found a cheap plastic 8'by 4' bed on line and has a pallet she found to put it on. A dustbin that was abandoned in the street has been commandeered for making compost in, seems like the family trait of collecting junk and putting it to use has been inherited :) I remember my brother had a bee smoker that he had made from the wing of a mini that had been left in a hedge after someone crashed. [/QUOTE]

Verification