I bought 4 of these and never experienced this phenomenon. Luckily. The small tealights are to weak, that‘s right. So i took the 8-hour ones, which are higher than the normal ones. In Germany you can find them in any drugstore.

I find Yankee Tea Lights(with trimmed wick) work really well with FireFlows

good video, thanks for mentioning me. Be carafull with the plywood though it is flameable

Mine did overheat with the tealights that came with the Pods. After I got some from the local drugstore the problem disappeared. They have a burn time of about 6 hours and a wick size of about 5-6 millimeter. I get a solid 4.5 hours of satisfying _gloop gloop_ from them. My mum bought some from a different store and their wick is twice as long. Bigger flame, more heat. She has to snip them down to get them to work. The problem with the Pods is that there's a lot of variation in tealights around the world.

Thanks for the informative video. How much heat is created above the unit? If it was under a shelf with 2 inches of clearance above would this be ok? Or is it too hot to hold hand above?

Do you recomend buying one instead of the electrical models? I like this one because of his shape and the reduced price but I'm worried about the tempertures and finding the right candles. Btw really good videos about lava lamps, never expected see so technical and accurate videos about lamps jajaja

Anyone worked out a way of converting to an electric/bulb configuration?

I would convert it to 12v halogen operation with a dimmer.

Well done for making these things work even moderately well. They are utter rubbish, how Mathmos get away with selling these useless lumps I don't know. If I can't sell mine I'm going to empty it and fill with fast flow glitter.