Cooking Oil Powered Lamp

by warengonzaga

14K4226

Intro: Cooking Oil Powered Lamp

Hello, guys! This time we are going to make a Cooking Oil Powered Lamp. This project is perfect for emergency situation like brown out or blackout or power shortage. You can alternatively fuel your lamp using a cooking oil!

We all know that cooking oil is very common household item in every home and in every kitchen. I will teach you how to make one which is super easy, useful and reliable in case of emergency. This idea is well known over the past years. I just want to share it our new generation and for our future generation.

The explanation behind this life hack is that cooking oil can be use as an alternative fuel. The oil is preventing the burner to complete buring the material. In short, it has low evaporation point than normal liquid. When heated it will slowly evaporated. This is based on my observation.

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What are you waiting for? Let's make something amazing today!

STEP 1: You'll Need!

All the things you'll need to build an amazing cooking oil powered lamp is by providing some of the typical and common household items! See below for the list and see the image for the demonstration.

* Cooking Oil
* Salt
* Stick
* Cotton
* Glass Nail Polish Bottle
* Matchbox/Lighter

Provide this items and you may now proceed!

STEP 2: Prepare the Glass Nail Polish Bottle

Get your glass nail polish bottle and clean it with dishwashing soap and water to remove excess chemicals in it. The cover of the bottle will not be useful you may trash it.

STEP 3: Add the Salt

The purpose of the salt is to provide a support for the stick to stand. There is no chemical reaction between oil and salt to light a lamp. Check out the images!

STEP 4: Add the Cooking Oil

After adding salt, you may now add our alternative fuel which is the cooking oil or vagetable oil, ut doesn't matter they are almost the same.

STEP 5: Make a Lamp Burner

Let's make together a lamp burner by using cotton and stick. Please let measure the height of the stick and match it with the height of the glass nail polish bottle. Follow how I made a lamp burner by looking at the picture!

STEP 6: Lamp Burner and Cooking Oil

Add a small amount of cooking oil to the cotton which is attached and wrapped arround to the stick. This will help to prevent burning faster of your lamp burner.

STEP 7: Assemble the Lamp

Place the lamp burner we create inside the glass nail polish bottle as you can see on the pictures! Plant the stick in the salt surface. The salt will act as a support to the stick.

STEP 8: Light Up the Lamp

This is the exciting part of my instructable! We are now going to light up and test the lamp. Get and light up your matchstick or your lighter and burn the top of your lamp burner and wait for few second to completely burn it and start a light. Alright! We're done making your own cooking oil powered lamp which is you can use it for emergency or as a lamp for your own purpose.

STEP 9: Enjoy!

Thank you very much for having your time to read my instructable! If you find my instructable useful please consider to vote this and hit the heart button. Follow me on instructables for more awesome DIYs and life hacks. Please leave any comment about my instructable or leave a question below. Thank you guys, I'll bid you farewell, see you in my mext instructable!

15 Comments

tlandrum 1 year ago

I’m not saying right or wrong…. But the salt maybe more important than you think. In ancient Egypt they learned that adding salt (Natron) to their oil would make the flame smokeless. This is how they were able to do so much work in the pyramid tombs. So that salt you are adding for support maybe a lot more important than you think. Try making it with small rocks or soemthing else. I bet you get more smoke. Thanks for the post.

warengonzaga 1 year ago

Oh amazing, thank you for the information. I might redo this experimentation based on your info, highly appreciated it!

warengonzaga 5 years ago

To answer your question, it is already indicated in the intro :)

"The explanation behind this life hack is that cooking oil can be use as an alternative fuel. The oil is preventing the burner to complete buring the material. In short, it has low evaporation point than normal liquid. When heated it will slowly evaporated. This is based on my observation."

Please let me know if you have any question :)

Science-Man 6 years ago

I tried it with bacon grease and it works nicely. Also bacon grease keeps for a while without stinking. cool post

ruby_murray 6 years ago

Great idea! Maybe the lid could be used to keep the lamp oil safe when not lit?
Thanks for awesome tutorial.

philslizzy 6 years ago

What does it smell like? I'd hate to think what a bacon grease lamp would smell like. Eww.

bishbashboshy 6 years ago

This looks like an accident waiting to happen.There is a good reason why oil lamps were replaced by electric lights･

Science-Man 6 years ago

I make these and instead of a skewer with cotton you can roll up half of a paper towel and put some oil on it and put it in the bottle and don't soak the paper towel all in oil so you light it better

Riffifi 6 years ago

does the bottle get hot while it's burning and could burn fingers?

warengonzaga 6 years ago

not, the upper most will be hot but not the lower most part of the bottle.

srennebohm 6 years ago

do you know if this works with bacon grease as well? we have a surplus of it, and if it works as good as cooking oil I will use it. interesting instructable.

warengonzaga 6 years ago

I don't know if it will work with that. You should try it buddy! Thank you guys...