Saturday, February 2, 2008

Hakuba ice candles

They say people in Finland make ice candles in their gardens at this time of the year when it gets coldest.


I tried to make some in following way this morning from last night.

#1. Check weather report, it probably needs to get minus 10 celsis at night at least for 5-6 hours ( maybe more ) to make this ice cover.
#2. Prepare tinplate buckets then fill enough water there. Put and leave them somewhere windy outside.
#3. Waking up at 5:30 a.m.,Grrrrrr and brrrr LOL


#4.Give some hot water around the outside of the buckets, have one upside down to take the ice out of them.


It was not frozen yet around the bottom of the buckets, this no frozen space is for a candle to go!

#5. Make fire at candles then put the ice cover upside down.



Candles are in glasses, so if you put them on snow, the glasses melt the snow around them to get deep in the snow as they get warm while fires at the candles are going on. You have to put something e.g. a thin piece of wood under the glass to avoid it. Air path needed at the lower side of the ice covers to supply oxen for the fire at candles.

**Be careful**
When you touch snow, ice, water under this condition of minus 10 celsis, you need to wear a pair of gloves. If you don't, your hands get frozen to some metal things e.g. door knobs, shovels etc when you touch them. Then it's really hard to get your hands apart from them! Maybe those who have not experienced this yet might not believe it, but just wear a pair of gloves!!





Just candles, but they can penetrate the thick ice ceilings by their warm fire.

Finland is located at that high latitude area, they can see sun nights in summer but they are to have long cold night time in winter instead. I guess that's one of reason why they make ice candles to warm their hearts.

***Additional note at night
It was damn cold outside today, been under zero all day long. It seems that it had been minus 14-13 celsis from midnight to 6 a.m. this morning!! The ice covers did not melt at all, so I used them again to enjoy ice candles at night as well.


Hayaokidori website

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Must be global warming (hahahaha)

I never heard of ice candles before..that is kind of cool..well cold really.

gamera63 said...

Hi Andrew.
Yep, cold enough to get frozen, brrrrrr. But actually cool enough to watch them for a while.

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