What’s inside: How to use essential oils to scent a room: This simple craft can edify your home atmosphere. After all, homeschoolers sometime spend a lot of time at home. Why not make it a delight to be home? It works for families who roadschool too!
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How to use Essential Oils to Scent a Room
This craft was part of my lovable learning project of learning essential oils. I pursued this in order to improve my “home atmosphere” that Charlotte Mason talks about in her famous phrase, “Education is an atmosphere.”
Starting Point
Technically, when I started the project, I could scent a room already.
I own two diffusers and use single essential oils in them often. I also have two non-electric “lamps” that have a candle heat up water with essential oil in it to scent a room. In the past, I’ve also used a clay light bulb ring a long time ago (which only works on incandescent bulbs).
To up my game in this area, I wanted to build a few reed diffusers and test at least 3 new blend combinations.
Background: What are diffusers?
Diffusers disperse aromatherapy into to air in a room.
Some of the older kind – like my clay ring on the light bulb, use heat to evaporate the scent. Reed diffusers also work by evaporation but without heat.
Today’s technology has advanced evaporation to make evaporative diffusers. These will use a little electric fan that blows a breeze across a pad soaked with essential oils. They have cute little snap-on diffusers that can snap onto your car heating or fan grill inside the car and you have a evaporative (non-electric) diffuser for in your car. I got my sons a couple of these. They can smell so MUCH better than either the inside of a stale car or those horrible artificially-scented hanging “air fresheners” that go on the mirror.
Some modern diffusers also work by heat, which will evaporate the oil also, but heat up a coil under the water that has some drops of essential oil. These are mimicking the anciently designed ceramic “heaters”. I have two of this kind also. Today’s modern ceramic (non-electric) ones are very pretty.
Next, some diffusers work on the principle of nebulizing the particles. They heat the air which gets sprayed as a fine mist over the oils and disburse the scent that way.
Finally, ultrasonic diffusers use vibrations to disburse the scents. Some ultrasonic humidifiers have a dual purpose of aromatherapy and also use essential oils.
I had one electric diffuser that didn’t use heat. They never said it worked ultrasonically, but it fits. I loved this one. It lasted for 10 years. Then I dropped it and it stopped working. So sad.
Back to Reed Diffusers
A reed diffuser is a small jar with bamboo reeds sticking out of it. The jar holds a liquid mixture with scent that soaks into and up the reeds and evaporates into the air. They are good for localized areas within a room.
To make a reed diffuser, you need:
- bamboo reeds
- a small glass or ceramic jar with a narrow neck (the opening should be narrow so that the liquid doesn’t evaporate too fast and the jar must be shorter than the height of the reed)
- water
- alcohol (vodka, not rubbing alcohol)
- essential oils
You can use an oil base instead of the water and vodka, like any of the carrier oils for essential oil blends. They say it lasts longer than vodka and water, but it’s so dry here anyway that I prefer the water base. The oil base leaves a gunky-ness that is difficult to clean out of the jar.
You can experiment. Sarah at One Essential Community uses both a light oil and vodka along with the essential oils.
That’s it. Put the water and vodka in the jar and add the oils. Depending on the size of your jar, put the water level at about 1/2 to 2/3 of the height of the jar. My little jars, which were pretty little glass jars reused from syrup, could only hold about a cup if you filled it. So I use about ½ cup water to 3 or 4 Tablespoons of vodka. Then I add 12-16 drops of oils.
What Scents to Try?
I’m trying out seasonal blends. Here are my favorites so far:
Summer
Summer scents to me are usually flowery, like lavendar, rose, geranium, and jasmine. But I like to balance it with some deeper undertones. I found that I liked lavender, lemon, and rosemary as a combination.
Fall
Fall scents are warm and cozy. Favorites are: Cinnamon, clove, sweet orange, vanilla, cedarwood, and spruce.
My favorite combination is Clove, Sweet Orange, and Vanilla.
Winter
I think Winter scents are the foresty scents you can smell on a crisp snowy sunny day. Like spruce, fir, and cedarwood or patchouli. But a lot of people like the “pumpkin spice” types of smells with clove, nutmeg and ginger.
They are both lovely.
Spring
And spring scents are refreshing and clean to me. Bring on the citrus smells, lemon, line, grapefruit, bergamot with a touch of some of the medicinal like rosemary.
Where to next?
There are lots of ways to learn how to blend. Find a trusted source of knowledge. Like Sarah from One Essential Community, Jennifer at Loving Essential Oils or Jill at the Prairie Homestead.
Keep Learning
Related Posts
More on how to make diffusers
- Homemade Air Fresheners: Essential Oil Reed Diffusers | Natures Nurture
- How To Make Homemade Reed Diffusers | Apartment Therapy
- How To Make Reed Diffuser Oil Refills | The Homemade Experiment