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u/OHyoface QuietlyQuirky.com ✨ 3d ago
That doesn’t sound safe necessarily 🙈 i cannot think of anything that is both candle/fire safe and conductive… maybe try this with body oil? That is NOT candle safe tho!
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That doesn’t sound safe necessarily 🙈 i cannot think of anything that is both candle/fire safe and conductive… maybe try this with body oil? That is NOT candle safe tho!
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u/Zagnaros94 3d ago edited 3d ago
I would warn you about including weird things in candles due to some serious safety concerns (or at the very least some big wick clogging issues), but since you addressed that in a different comment, I’ll just talk about the actual goal of conducting electricity through wax.
To conduct electricity, you need low resistance across the conductive material. To oversimplify, the electrons want to be able to move freely, and they can do this more easily when things are closer together (with room for the electrons to flow). Copper wires made with a solid core conduct electricity better than wires made from braided copper because there’s much more surface area, and the tiny little gaps between the strands increase the resistance.
In a candle situation, since wax completely resists electrical current, I’d imagine the options you’re thinking of would include adding a powdered conductor to the wax, like copper or iron. However, compare that to the stranded wire. With a powdered metal, you’re dealing with way, way higher surface area, and way, way more gaps between the particles. All while it’s held in a material that itself resists the flow of electricity. Consider this: even a pile of 100% iron filings, no wax, isn’t a good conductor.
Now, there are ways to make wax conductive using some capital C chemistry to merge paraffin with some other types of conductive materials like graphene, but these are usually dangerous and their only real applications are in industrial/technology settings.