Fire brigade warns: Tea light stoves as "substitute heating" are highly flammable
Created: 09/28/2022, 15:58
By: Stella Henrich
Small homemade stoves for tea lights make firefighters prick up their ears.
Such a self-made vessel obviously represents a high fire hazard. The fire chiefs warn urgently against it.
Munich - Necessity is the mother of invention.
And rising energy bills with falling temperatures meanwhile too.
Many a thrifty contemporary thinks that he can warm up the apartment in a different way.
A little research on the internet and you'll find lots of simple kits for ovens to tinker with at home.
Tea light oven triggers fire brigade deployment - experts worry about imitators
But be careful: fire brigade experts advise against home-made tea light stoves in your own four walls.
Just recently, such a supposed replacement heating system in Tuttlingen almost caused a major fire.
This is reported by the Schwäbische
news portal
.
Residents of an apartment building had alerted the fire brigade, who found a heavily smoky stairwell on arrival.
In the apartment from which the smoke came, several small tea light ovens burned unattended.
On one of the tealight ovens, a porcelain plate that was supposed to serve as a heater broke from the heat and fell on “combustible material”.
So heavy smoke had developed.
Homemade "Tealight Oven" brand
Several tea lights should be placed on a surface and lit.
A vessel – in this example clay flowerpots – is fixed above the tealights, where it is intended to absorb the heat and radiate it into the room instead of letting it 'fizz' upwards.
If you – purely mathematically – want to bring about a perceptible warming effect through tea light ovens, you would have to set up one oven with one tea light each per square meter.
Fire brigade warns: tea light ovens are "mega-dangerous"
Luckily for the residents, a smoke detector alerted the neighborhood.
The fire brigade is certain that the residents would have suffocated if the stoves had also been burning at night.
"The tea light ovens are extremely dangerous," warns city fire chief Klaus Vorwalder.
They are also more than dubious from an economic point of view.
It takes 75 watts of energy per square meter to heat a room.
A normal heater has 2000 watts.
A tealight, on the other hand, only uses 40 watts.
In order to heat a 16 square meter room, the residents would have to light 30 tea lights.
With the amount of tea lights alone, this construction measure does not appear to make sense.
Especially since fire with an open flame consumes oxygen, which means that it has to be ventilated regularly.
And then the painstakingly generated heat is gone again.
If a so-called wax fire occurs as a result of the operation of the ovens, it cannot even be extinguished with water, the city fire chief told
Schwäbische
.
Then only a fire blanket or a special extinguishing spray such as in a fire extinguisher will help to extinguish the fire.
Actually romantic, but tea lights are not suitable for home-made ovens to heat the apartment.
(Iconic image) © Gudrun Krebs / imago
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Fire brigade warns: Children and pets are at risk
In addition, imitators should also consider the dangers that arise for children.
Because they can easily get burn injuries from the hot clay pots.
Another source of danger is your own pets.
Because the pots can of course also be easily knocked over by rampaging pets.
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Consumers who still want to do without heating with gas heating, there are also other useful and much safer alternatives such as the heat pump.
And if you really want to light a cozy tea light candle, you can do so in a nearby church.
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