I’ve currently got a “thing” for these waving flame candles. The good ones are surprisingly convincing and often use a magnet being deflected by a pulsed coil to create the movement. This one has a fan to blow the flame about, but that makes it quite noisy with a continuous whine that occasionally ramps up and down in pitch, and a really annoying tendency for the plastic flame to stall in one position. Ironically a promotional YouTube video for these candles which is notable for it’s continuous panning about to try and hide the fact that when they are moving it’s a very repetitive swirling effect, has one of the candles in it’s stalled state in the video. My guess is that the swirling vortex of air caused by the rotating fan is creating a bias that twists the flame in that direction, stalling it against its mounting. I get the impression that a lot of things didn’t go to plan in this design, since there’s a full gimbal for the flame that has been locked off in one direction. The LED that lights the flame is also the sort of lurid yellow you expect to find in dollar-store flickering LED tea-lights. It’s not befitting for a product that is clearly trying to be upmarket.
The unit uses four AA cells for power wired in a series parallel pair to give about 3V with a longer runtime than just 2 cells alone.
This particular model is very much following the trend for these things with the usual features like a sloped wax candle body and the option of a 6-hour on 18-hour off timer so it lights at exactly the same time each night. I’m not convinced how accurate that would be, since the PCB has a COB (chip on board) to control the fan and LED directly but no crystal to guarantee any great timing accuracy. The tolerance of on-board oscillators tends to be a bit random, but I guess a few minutes either way is no great deal. The circuit board itself is sparse with quite a lot of components missing. It has what looks like a small switching step-up supply to provide a stable operation with falling battery voltage. There’s a resistor for the LED, the chip itself and that’s pretty much it.
I bought this because there were so many bad reviews of it and I wanted to see how bad it was. I’m afraid it lives up to its reviews, which is a shame because it’s physically well built with a lot more custom plastic mouldings than the other magnetic versions. However, when it comes to the crunch the magnetically pulsed candles are infinitely better than this one.
