Permaculture, Will It Save The World?

[jomifl]

Thought I'd let everyone into this little known tip that will cut your fuel bills this winter.
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/heat-your-room-8-pence-day
but not so as you'd notice, in fact candle wax is more expensive than paraffin ...to$$ers.

[Teddio]

The enthalpy of combustion for paraffin wax is approximately 45 Megajoules per kilogram.
If a tea light candle has a mass of 10 grams then its heat output will be 0.45 Megajoules or 450 000 Joules. This is equivalent to a 1kW electric heater being switched on for 450 seconds or 7.5 minutes.
The cost of the electricity at 12p per kilowatt-hour will be 1.5p
How much is a tea light candle at IKEA ? probably similar.
Will someone please check my figures.

[jomifl]

Bulk candle wax (2kg pack) costs about £5 per kilo so that is 5p per 10 gramme tea light(probably more expensive at Ikea) so that is 3.3 times as expensive as electricity. Heating paraffin costs about £1 per kilo ie 20% of the price of candle wax and you can get heaters specially designed to burn it as efficiently as possible. So heating paraffin is cheaper than electricity ( in resistive heating) which is why poor people use it, possibly they are a little more pragmatic than permaculturists
I think 'permaculture' must mean 'I can't do sums'