If you like candles, live off grid without limitless electricity, or like to have some lighting back-up, you might be interested in this simple DIY project of creating olive oil lamps. Or vegetable oil lamps. Both oils if gone rancid are not healthy to consume, so why not use them in a different way?
If you don’t have a true oil lamp you can make one from materials around your house. It only takes about 15 minutes.
Making an oil lamp is quite easy, fast and cheap.
The basic parts are a piece of twisted wire, a length of twine, some olive oil or vegetable oil and a container to hold it everything in.
For the lamp you could use almost any small glass or metal container … old tuna cans work great for this! Just bend down the lid, lay your wick in, fill it up and you’re done 🙂
For a wick you can use regular wick if you have, if not then a string from an old mop, an old shoelace, a tightly rolled up piece of paper, a porous stick, a strip of cotton underwear, or some jute string. Just try and see what works for you.
If your container needs a wick-holder (some won’t, like a tuna can with the lid bent down) improvise a piece of wire wound around a nail. Its job is to hold the wick up out of the oil.
You may think that burning vegetable oil must be very smelly. Some oil could be indeed, but olive oil burns very clean and without odor. Smoking oil smells unpleasant, but burning oil does not. So forget the stench of a smoking frying pan. However, even the smellier types of oils can be used economically outdoors.
Perhaps you have a bottle of forgotten salad oil at the back of the cupboard. Well, now you have some use for it. Or perhaps you want to get rid of the deep frying fat after making a few batches of French fries. Light your porch, patio or garden path.
You could even collect waste oil from fast food places. Strain it and use it for your lamps. You could also add a few drops of essential oil for a scented light. The volatile oil will evaporate easily with the nearby heat, before the flame can actually burn it.
And there you have it. Please let us know what you think, in the comments area below.
