Winter’s here with all its holiday cheer and if you’re like me, way too much food. Also something that winter’s very good at is making the great outdoors cold and the small indoors even colder. But worry not because Marco Zagaria, a student at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts, promises he can make your home warm and comfortable for a measly 10 cents a each 5 hours, without using any electricity.

Marco’s design, which he named the Egloo, is a cute, tiny terracotta dome-like heater that harnesses the power of a few candles at a time to heat a whole room.

“Egloo is conceived for contrasting continuous waste of electricity used for warming domestic rooms, offering, as a option, a candle-powered way that provides a cheaper and more ecological energy, taking advantage of features of terracotta that stores the heat and slowly and gradually releases it by radiation, even after it blows out,” Egloo’s website reads.

This elegant little heater was a immense success on Indiegogo, receiving 488% of the sum it needed to be put on the market. Their website is now up and running, offering deals on the Egloos, currently on a 10€ discount. It’s a bit on the expensive side, with the least expensive “natural” colored dome still clocking in at 60€ each, but you will easily turn a profit in time with what you’ll be saving on heating. If it works as well as the designer claims.

“Egloo is a useful utensil to warm average rooms up with a very restrained cost, needs three candles for a complete refill, enough for warming up a 20mq environment. Each refill has a life of 5 hours with less than 10 cent,” the website details.

The two domes of the Egloo are different in thickness, with the lower dome being thinner to capture heat more easily and the top dome being thicker to retain the energy the first dome releases and radiate it over a longer period of time.

Now, I do have to admit that I haven’t tried the Egloo. I like the idea, I love the look, but as far as pure efficiency or safety is concerned I can’t vouch for the design. But in theory it seems sound and terracotta has been long used for heating implements due to its good heat-retaining properties. And as always, every lit fire is a potential danger in any household so don’t leave it unattended.

So take my enthusiasm for this tiny dome with a pinch of salt but, if you happen to have an extra 60€ (~65$) lying around and are looking for what may turn out to be either a nifty way to keep warm or an ineffective heater turned elegant table accessory, give it a go.

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