How To Build An Emergency Heater

In times of natural disasters or when loosing your power, its important to know How To Build An Emergency Heater. The process of building one of these temporary, emergency heating devices is very simple, and can be made with a variety of different recycled products, or things you can find for cheap. In our video, Bill and my self (Jesse) teach you about the supplies your will need, how to assemble the emergency heater, and show your with a heat gun exactly how effective one of these little things can be.  

How To Build An Emergency Heater

Knowing How To Build An Emergency Heater can very well mean the difference between a long cold night, and a night of being able to feel your limbs. When the power goes out, many people will suffer without having an effective way of heating their house. Although building an emergency heater won’t bring your entire house up to a highly warm state, It will keep a bedroom, or survival shelter warm for several hours. In the video above, you will see we use very little supplies. 1 – Solid rock/cement Tile 2 – Broken rock/cement Tiles 1 – Terracotta Planting Pot 4 – long burning emergency tea candles   After watching the video, you should be fairly informed on How To Build An Emergency Heater, but just in case words work better for you, here’s how you build one.   1. Place your solid, flat, non-flammable emergency heater surface somewhere away from flammable items. When testing out ours, I set it in an empty corner of my room on my hardwood floor. 2. Use sections of your 2 broken tiles to create three (3) points of contact to set your Terracotta planting pot on. 3. Light 4 long burning emergency tea candles, and place them evenly within your three broken tile piles. 4. Set your Terracotta pot upside down on top of you candles, sitting it on your broken tile piles.   And that’s it! You now know How To Build An Emergency Heater. Just remember to make sure there are no flammable items near by. Although this emergency heater doesn’t get extremely hot, it still uses open candle flames to heat it self, and it’s best to be safe.

Improving your emergency heater

I have seen numerous websites with examples of this type of emergency heater and how to build them. Each one is slightly different, but for the most part they all work about the same. I have seen some examples online, where they use a series of smaller Terracotta pots in sequence to create more layers to trap the heat. Although this might increase the overall heat conservation, we found no significant improvement over these designs. Because the laws of thermal dynamics states that no more energy can be converted or transitioned than the heat created from combustion, one Terracotta pot will be enough to do the job. Adding more pots simply holds the heat in better, making the transfer of heat slower, which doesn’t actually heat your room any better. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with your own designs however. There are many different ways to make these, and we simply wanted to teach you How To Build An Emergency Heater so that you can start testing what works best for you, from which supplies you can get, and with how big your room/house is how effective one of these might be.  

Getting more from your emergency heater

Having this nice, and simple emergency heater will be handy if the power goes out, or if you need to heat a temporary shelter or room, and we have one little trick to make it work even better. After your first night of using this emergency heater, you will have left over, empty candle tins. Take these tins, give them a quick clean up (pull the left over wax and wic out) and fill them about 3/4 of the way with water. Place these on top of your emergency heater somewhere near the exhaust hole. As the heater heats the water up, the water will start to evaporate into the air. This will effectively increase the moisture in the air, making it easier to heat the room, as more heat will be retained from the moisture.  

Emergency Heater: A Fine Cooking Stove

Surprisingly enough, this design works great for a makeshift cooking stove. Although it doesn’t work well as an oven, the small hole at the top of the Terracotta pot focuses the heat from the candles, and can actually heat up a can in about 20 minutes. The top of the pot got around 205 degree’s and stayed there while the candles burned. Make sure your surface is stable, and that your terracotta pot wont shift from slight movements. You can set the can directly on top of the hole, Or you can use empty candle tins (3 of them) in a triangle shape around the hole, and set your can on top of those.    Disclosure: The links in this article are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, we will make a small amount of commission if you decided to purchase something from our affiliate companies. Although this is how we fund our website, and support our families, please do not spend any money on products we recommend unless it’s something you need or feel it will help you or your family.