I spun the propeller on my cap, and the google hive mind came up with this...techman wrote:I am really impressed with it. Really loving it. It does carbon up quickly though and needs a lot of cleaning. It may be that I am using cheaper tea lights. I am still testing it fully though before I release my results. I thoroughly test a product before I talk about it on video or my blog. I will let you know when I am done. One thing is that I am extremely impressed with the brightness of the LED light considering the power comes from a tea light.
If we assume a tea light is about 1.5 inches in diameter, and 0.5 inches tall, that makes for a volume of wax of about 0.883 cubic inches. So if we assume the wax is simple paraffin, that should work out to about 13 grams of wax, With an energy density for paraffin of 42KJ/g, that's 547 KJ of stored energy, or 152 Watt Hours!
So if you were able to capture all that energy, store it, and convert it to light, you'd have a 152 watt hour portable sun! Of course we know nothing is 100% efficient, and there's no way to get that all into the battery with current technologies even if we could harvest it, but still, even harvesting a percentage of that is indeed impressive.