This Candle-Powered Pod Claims to Heat a Room on 10 Cents a Day

There’s all kinds of creative ways to keep your house warm in the winter: Plastic wrap on windows, tin foil behind the radiator, draught-stopping snakes.

Now there’s candles.

An Indiegogo-funded product called Egloo claims it can heat a room for just 10 cents a day with only tea lights. You place the candles (the manufacturer recommends these super cheap ones from Ikea) in the base, light them, cover it with a metal grill and place two terra cotta domes on top. The domes capture and concentrate the heat from the candles, then radiate it out to the rest of the room.

Within five minutes, the device begins to heat the room and will last for about four hours, the makers say. Their math: The candles cost about 3.5 cents each, so a four hour burn costs about 10 cents, or 2.5 cents/hour.

The little pods range in price from €50 to €90, about $57 to $103, which is fairly close to the price of many space heaters available online.

But are they really a better deal than a conventional, electricity-chugging heater?

According to the website, the Egloo only heats up a room by 1 to 3 degrees so unless you’re sitting right next to it, you might not feel much of a difference.

Many electric space heater models, on the other hand, need about 1500 watts of electricity, on average. At the current national average cost of electric per kilowatt hour provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, you’re looking at almost 18 cents an hour, or about 75 cents for the same four-hour period.

Of course, a space heater can really pump out the heat, beating the BTUs of candles any day. So you’d have to have quite a few Egloos to make a room not feel like an igloo in the winter.

The Egloo could be a cute addition to your coffee table, but it may not be a particularly efficient way to keep cozy this winter.