TEA LIGHTS and energy waste.

So .. I see you can heat your home with a tea-light under an inverted flower pot.
It just appeals to my debunking instinct, so here goes.

A tea-light weights about 17 grams. Paraffin contains about 49 kJ/g.
Total is 833kJ. If it burns in 4 hours, we have about 833/4kJ/hr = 208 kJ/hr
= 208kJ/3600 seconds = 57.8 W pr. tea light.

Knowing it takes about the 600W setting on my heater blower to heat my fairly large office, I speculate I could do it with 10 tea-lights instead of electricity. A trip to IKEA would get me about 100 tea-lights for $4 and I'd be looking at about 40 cents to heat the office for the 4 hours they burn.
In tea-lights, that's about 40 cents for 2.4kWh (600Wx4h).

Should I instead decide to turn my electric heater on, 
I'd pay 6.9 cents pr. kWh or 16.5 cents in electricity. 
If I lost all creativity and just used my natural gas forced air furnace, I'd pay about $7 pr GJ for the natural gas, which is 2.5 cents pr. kWh or 6 cents for the 4 hours.

Let me say that again; 4 hours of heat costs me:
Tea lights :   $0.40
Electricity:   $0.17
Natural gas: $0.06

What if we went to Sweden and did the math there?
After all the IKEA tea-light mine is in Sweden.
Hmm... over there 100 tea lights cost 42 kr. or about $8.25.
That's 80 cents for 4 hours of heat. 

In Sweden electricity is about 60 cents against our 17 cents for the 2.4kWh

Tea lights :   $0.80 (SWEDEN, IKEALand)
Electricity:   $0.60
 
So our Swedish cousins could actually save 50% in heating if they had electric heat and could tow massive amounts of tea-lights over from IKEA in Vancouver.
Now it's getting crazy.

The crazy part is not the difference in price, but how SLOPPY it makes us here with our energy consumption and thereby CO2 budget.


A typical 1500 square feet home in Denmark uses about 18 MWh a year. By law they are insulated with 300mm of insulation material in the roof and most have double or triple windows and zone heating. The price is about 3300 dollars a year.

My home here in Vancouver used about 70GJ last year, which is 20MWH, for which I paid about $1200. ABOUT ONE THIRD of what it would have cost in Denmark.

But I did that with a year average outside temperature of 13 degrees, which means I heated my house by 6 degrees for that sum. The Danish year average temperature is 8 degrees C and the wind is always up. They need to heat the house by 11 degrees to get 19C inside (twice as much as here). Vancouver has no wind to speak of, but Denmark has a fairly steady average wind, which increases the heat bill by at least 50%. This leads me to conclude:

A conservative guess is that my (rented) Vancouver home here leaks heat about 3 times as fast as the average Danish home. My CO2 footprint could be 1/3 with proper insulation.  
If I took an average Danish home and plonked it down here in Vancouver, insulated to standards, I would be paying about $35 a month in heat, one third of what I pay now.

If I took a Vancouver home and plonked it down in Denmark, I'd be paying about $10000 a year, $833 a month, in heat, with the current Danish energy prices.

That about sums it up when it comes to a Canadian or North American CO2 footprint.
IF our energy prices hit the Danish (European) levels, I bet we could reduce the damage we do.

But not by burning tea-lights from Ikea.

/<