Resistive heaters still suck though because Heat pumps give you 200-400% efficiency. So heating wise, “100%” still less than maximally efficient.
(Not a violation of thermodynamics btw. Heat pumps use electricity to move heat energy that already exists, so the electric power in is often significantly smaller than the heat coming out of the device)
Did someone say heat pumps?
I’m so happy this man nerded out about heat pumps for a few hours.
But now, all I see is inferior heaters.
It’s the burden of knowledge
Having been on long term sick leave for 15 years means you have to do something with your time and I spend a lot of it learning new things to various depths. I now understand why some (though not all) older people are angry: when you know a lot about a lot you see how bad many things are. There’s so much inefficiency, shit design, shit quality, shit shit everywhere. It hard to not let it get to you.
And as things degrade you remember how it was.
And this one is…… 1600 watts. Surely this “large” room heater will be……. Siiiixxxxteen hundred watts.
…HOURS???
Bro’s got multiple, hour+ long, videos about various types of heat pumps.
And somehow im riveted. Doesn’t feel like droning on. I wish I could communicate like him.
Removed by mod
Hours of videos about dishwashers too
This man taught us that heaters are indeed about as efficient as you can get in turning energy into heat through a little thing called resistance.
Hey that’s the guy I see once a year at Christmas time!
Coming down your chimney?
No he’ll be criticizing your choice of Christmas string lights, or lack thereof.
His videos are why I got a heat pump water heater instead of a standard one when mine died. I figure in summer I can hook the exhaust duct up to my hvac and get a bit of free air conditioning out of it, since I don’t have AC yet. Tiny extra bonus piped straight to my bedroom.
I came here to see a picture of this man.
Name? Favorite link?
TechnologyConnections yt channel. I see his video on dishwashers mentioned a lot.
Resistive heaters still suck though
- Resistive heaters are much more portable and flexible. (edit: and quiet)
- Resistive heaters are a viable backup when heat pumps fail in extremely cold weather.
- Resistive heaters are less money upfront for if you only have to use them occasionally.
One is not directly beneath the other. Both have their place.
Fair enough, do we need to extend this heater solidarity to combustibles as well?
I mean technically they’re infinitely electrically efficient if you don’t use electricity to start them lol
For niche cases like when you’re on a camping trip and made a campfire
Strictly speaking that’s not efficiency, but a coefficient of performance.
And funny enough the work energy doesn’t even have to be electricity. It’s actually mechanical energy, that is required and you could even power a heat pump with a steam or diesel engine.
God I spent too much time arguing with people who say that heat pumps are >100% efficient…
Every electric device is a heater. Some just do other things too.
A brushless motor only converts ~5% of its input to heat. That’s low enough that you can reasonably call it a side effect.
Now, a computer, that’s a heater that happens to produce math as a side effect. 100% of its input ends up as heat.
math as a side effect
That’s a funny way of spelling porn
Fun fact! Your porn machine can also be used to shitpost.
I love firing up my PC and gaming on cold winter nights. A well placed fan or two and I can spread it through my entire apartment and the heat won’t kick on all night. Ends up saving me money, my heater costs way more than my PC to run.
Sounds like your cold winter nights are not very cold.
It goes down well below freezing here. My apartment is small.
By “well below” do you mean -30? Or do you mean -5? Either way, you must have much better insulation than I do, because I have multi-kilowatt heaters and even on not-so-cold days my poor PC can’t compete, no matter how hard I game.
Like anywhere from -15 to -4 C (around 5-25 F). I also keep it around 15 C (60 F) in my apartment to keep heating costs lower so it doesn’t need to get super warm to keep my thermostat from kicking on.
It all becomes heat eventually in the end though. Sometimes it’s just a multi step complex process outside the physical bounds of the heater.
Wait a sec, is the universe just God’s space heater?
In god’s universe it is winter and that’s why the earth is heating up. It says so right in Ecclesiasties. Boom, toasted climate change nerds.
Depends on the god.
Yes, what is that motor doing? If it’s a drill, it’s spinning a drill bit and that drill bit generates a lot of friction when it tries to make a hole in something, and that friction generates heat. If it’s spinning a tire, that tire generates a lot of friction with the road.
It might output the results of a computation once in a while though
Main effect of a brushless motor is moving matter really fast, which, on a molecular level, is same as heating it.
if you dont count powering i/o devices (other heaters) (or electromagnetic wave emmiters so heaters with extra steps)
Indeed we’ve plugged in a bitcoin miner to our central heating and now heating is “free”. I’m not sure how profitable it is when you’re not using the heat though.
Also a question of optimizing its use
100% efficient!!! You’re using all the energy to do meaningful work!
Setup sponsored by Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, to have a real toasting effect.
A completely valid pannini press, imo.
Like this is literally the ‘modern problems require modern solutions’ meme.
I’ve used older PC battlestations of mine as ‘bonus’ spaceheaters more than once, lol, sorta like those ‘pocket warmer’ apps for phones that would just run some absurd computation that would redline the cpu, hahah!
I have a little “tradition” of doing a playthrough of very hardware-demanding stuff in winter. Tarkov is one of my favs for this since it’s unoptimized as hell and the post soviet aesthetics really fit the season
I may get flack for this but mine was the Cinematic Mod version of HL2.
Not because I wanted … the terrible ‘cinematic’ music, or ludicrous XXX character model ‘upgrades’… I genuienly liked the revamped maps, greater texture detail.
I had some frozen imitation crab legs that I wanted to eat, but didn’t want to microwave proper. I put them on top of my PC’s GPU radiator and ran a stress test while watching stuff so it would thaw faster without overheating.
That’s sausage-bread though
Oh.
Sorry, I’m… actually unfamiliar with concept.
Is that basically a sausage with a small loaf of bread baked around it?
Sorry it’s a sausage roll in English; it’s called sausage bread in Dutch
Ah ok! I don’t speak Dutch, but it looks like a kind of … flakier, pastry style bread… honestly looks delicious!
Closest thing I’ve personally had to that would probably be a piroshki/pirogi, or maybe a calzone, but those both use more… bready breads, if that makes any sense, lol.
GAH! Unless you personally disinfected them and wiped them clean of disinfectant, GAH! Know how many people play footsie with those?
… Some people keep track of their power bricks and know where they’ve been.
… Never thought ‘good cable management’ would become a hygiene/sanitation issue, but, apparently it is.
Not me. I leave my power bricks at the bus station and tell them don’t call until you have daddy’s money.
… so… you’re saying I can rent a power brick from you?
noo get the oily greasy food away from technology 😭
What are you, afraid of fire? This is progress. Cavemen were bold and progressed.
I’m not well-versed on this topic, but doesn’t the AC frequency cause alternating fields in the heating element, making it vibrate slightly? If that’s correct, then you’re losing an incredibly stupidly tiny amount of energy as sound too.
Even sound energy eventually ends up as heat, though!
And that satisfying glow is losses as light, which will do some heating, but not as efficiently
There’s a whole class of electric heater that do this intentionally. Radiant heaters are awesome for outdoor patios and other spaces like uninsulated garages where you care more about heating surfaces than the air itself.
Unless it is visible to the window at which point the light escapes and doesn’t heat your house 100% efficiently
Most of the heating energy would actually be IR, which many types of window glass will be designed to reflect. It probably depends on what kind of coatings are used. Basically all car windows block IR to help keep the inside of the car cool in the sun.
It’s a silly thing, but if it glows orange, and if any of that orange light escapes or is visible from the window, it is not 100% efficient. But this is just pedantic in reality, even cheap heaters will do a good job of converting electricity into heat.
Isn’t some energy still dissipated as light instead of heat?
Which travels to a location, hits it and is eventually converted to heat.
So not a heater…but the universe.
Typically a heater is in a room, so any light doesn’t need to go further than the nearby walls
But a heater produces heat and light. The light might turn into heat later but that’s not heat from the heater. Otherwise everything is s heater and it’s all part of the same heater… the universe.
When light is absorbed by surface, the material temperature increases and remits light at a longer wave, ussually in the IR spectrum. So its safe to say all light is heat enegry.
Yep, every electric device is a toaster, some are just super inefficient at it.
Remember: Every device is a smoke machine if you use it wring enough.
Also: Every electrical device is filled with smoke and the job of electricians is to stop the smoke from escaping, which would render the device useless.
The correct technical term is magic smoke.
Today I learned
Hehe yes, we called it “magic smoke” in the early days of my engineering studies. Devices run on magic smoke so they stop working if the magic escapes.
Noise would be a small but non-zero form of heat loss that shouldn’t contribute to temperature increase
Noise would turn in to heat as it’s absorbed, so it’s just heat with extra steps. Same deal with lights
The entropy machine has a 100% efficiency
Does it make any sound?
Yup, that little buzz / hum is technically lost energy
Well, if you want to go all “technically” on this, then that sound technically dissipates as heat when it is absorbed by the interior of the room.
Some of it does. Most of it even, but not all of it
Why not? My underestanding is that 100% energy of a sound wave will ultimately be transformed to kinetic energy to particles in the room, be it a wall’s, an ear drum’s or air’s.
As a rule of thumb that’s fine, but it’s not precisely true. There will always be a little energy going everywhere it can.
Entropy doesn’t mean “everything turns into heat” it means everything becomes dispersed across all the possible states. Most of the possible states are possible states of heat, so that’s where most of the energy ends up, but only most. The chance that all the energy ends up as heat is similar to the chance that you turn on a heater and it heats up everything except for a small thermometer which stays mysteriously cold. Sure, most of the heat would be outside the thermometer, but you expect the thermometer to get its share of the energy. Equally you expect light and sound and gravitational potential and chemical to get their “fair share”, even if it’s a very small share.
Edit: I guess you could say all the energy would pass through heat at some point. That’s probably true, but equally you could say all the energy ends up as light at some point, and that’s probably true too, as it wobbles between possible states randomly. More usefully can ask what ratio ends up in each form before reaching a steady state (where the amount of sound turning into heat is equal to the amount of heat turning into sound)
Even if the heater’s energy partially is not wasted by a sound, it certainly is by generating magnetic field.
A heat pump will drop to 100% efficiency in cold enough weather.
Can heat pumps drop below 100%?
They can drop all the way to 0 if the temperature difference is high enough. You can’t heat your house with a heat pump if it’s 0K outside.
Heat pumps generally come with an electrical resistive backup in case it’s too cold outside, so even at arbitrarily low temperatures a heat pump can only drop to 100%
At that point, the heat pump is off and you’re using a resistive heater. You can’t just glue an LED to an incandescent lightbulb and call it a 50% efficient incandescent lightbulb.
True. You know, the moment I left that comment, I thought that was pedantic, I shouldn’t have said it, but by that point if I had deleted it it would just sit there saying deleted forever and that would bother me even more
I usually issue retractions by just putting a strikethrough on the text of the comment (using double tildes [~~] on each side).
Wait. Hold my beer.
Heat pump could heat your house if it’s near 0K “outside”. Heat pumps are how we chill to near 0K anyways. And by heat pump I mean literally a window air conditioner. Replace the freon in your typical AC with helium and get a really fancy evaporator (cold head or cold finger is the trade term) and you could probably get a 10cc vial on the end to sub 70K. With vacuum and a bigger 240V window AC unit you can get near 4K. Running multiple heat pumps in stages and with liquid nitrogen as coolant for some of them and you can condense helium and push really close to 0K.
induction losses:
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn’t know I had
Power-line losses before your house, so a electric heater is only 96%-85% effecient. When the heating for bird feets is accounted, it’s 100%.
Blaming the heater for losses in the power lines doesn’t seem fair.
You’re assuming this heater is on grid power. We just need to power it by solar panels that are inside the house, under a skylight. Now we’ve got a 100% efficient heater, just don’t ask about PV efficiency…
Unless it makes a noise or a light that escapes the house
Well it is heat. If we count power lines as part of an electric heater I’d say that’s still effective.
Perhaps this is a dumb question, but perhaps it is not:
If you just had, in say a studio apartment, or a single bedroom, basically just a large container of water, where the container is made of something fairly to considerably thermally conductive…
Would or could this act as something like a thermal regulator for the room, to a potentially useful degree, such that it could ease the overall power usage of an AC/Heating system?
The water doesn’t do anything, in like a designed machine sense; its not part of plumbing or heating, its just a big ole tank of water, sitting there.
The idea I am going with is something like how large static bodies of water act as regulators for nearby climate zones, through a day night cycle … they tend to keep temperatures in the surrounding area a bit more stable, though of course humidity and the water cycle have other effects in a more open weather system.
I also realize there are a lot of potentially confusing or confounding variables at play here.
But my thinking is that maybe, at some scale, in some conditions, this could basically normalize your day-night temperature cycle, at least somewhat.
Obviously in real world, just a simple tank of water would potentially freeze in winter, or boil in summer, in more extreme environments, that you’d at bare minimum have to have some mechanical system to prevent problems… but uh, … yeah.
You see this with normal heating systems. My house has hot air heating with a big burner and vents in the rooms. It is great for instant heat but once it turns off you lose the heat just as fast. And if you dont have a vent in the room it can be pretty cold.
But the house I grew up in had water filled radiators in every room. Took ages to warm up the house but it would transfer an awful lot of heat into the brick walls so it would stay warm for a really long time after the heating shut off.
So in the old house in winter you really didnt notice the heating turning on and off but in my new one it is painfully obvious. I really want to rip it out and get a better system.
Yes, this is called thermal mass, or more scientificly, heat retention. The more stuff you in have a space, the more resilient to change it’ll temperature it is. Insulation, is basically putting a bunch of high retention materials in perimeter of a building so that it stays more consistent
Hrm.
What about:
Radiant Barrier.
Basically, as I understand it, this stuff is extremely good at reflecting heat… not… absorbing and containing it. And it is relatively stupidly cheap, for how effective it is.
Like, its so effective that the industry that makes traditional US home insulation batting… basically did everything they could to make it so as few people know this stuff exists as possible.
Radiant barrier is a different insulation mechanism and is also good. The nice thing about radiant barrier is it requires very little material to do its thing. The best solution is a combination of the 2, but most insulation is still opperating by thermal mass.
That is in line with my understanding as well.
I don’t think it’s a dumb question at all. I’m not a physics person but I think what you’re describing is a thermal battery. It’s the reason people put tiles in their ovens for smoothing out hot and cold spots and moderating temperature swings from the oven cutting on and off or opening the door.
Sounds like adobe sorta.
Lots of places in the desert with big walls.
Large brick/stone fireplace+chimneys do similar in colder climates, holds heat in the winter and stays cooler in the summer.
Oh, I hadn’t even thought of that. I always thought stoves were just way more efficient, but a giant old school hearth-thing actually makes a lot more sense now.
So a bunch of the other comments have mentioned this but you would be creating a thermal battery essentially. These can be useful for smoothing out the temperature changes in that room but it isn’t exactly efficient since the only way to heat or cool it is by changing the temperature at the surface of the container.
Adding passive heat sinks like radiator fins would increase the efficiency as it would absorb or diffuse the temperature difference with increased surface area but it would still would be subject to things like the air conditioning turning on and off more regularly when there is a higher ambient temperature delta or condensation when the weather is hot and moisture is high. You’ve essentially added an inactive water boiler tank in the middle of a room that takes up space and takes a long time to either heat up or cool down and it still would be lagging behind where you want the temperature to be.
You’re on the right track to a good idea with trying to store thermal energy but it can be made better with a few tweaks:
- Let’s make the tank part of an active system by adding pumps and a heat exchanger that integrates with your current air duct system (assuming you have one). We can heat and cool the tank directly instead of passively so that our time and energy is directed more efficiently.
- Insulate it so that we minimize any unwanted heat changes
- Move it to a utility room or outside so you aren’t taking up room space
Now we have a thermal battery that works with your air conditioning system as opposed to against it. This can be paired with other methods of heat/cooling such as a solar system.
But if you’re in a dorm or somewhere you can’t make changes, it could make sense if you aren’t paying for electricity, you actively heat/cool the bucket by putting it in a freezer or on a heater/fire, and you don’t mind a large metal container in the middle of the room? Just watch for a lot of condensation when cooling the air.
Move it deep underground, congtats you just invented geothermal 😁
Honestly, not even that deep can used for geothermal. You can dig 6 feet deep for a horizontal ground loop in most places and still be completely usable for a ground source heatpump.
Congrats, you’ve invented a radiator.
Useful? No, mainly because you need circulation of the air to feel it.
I didn’t downvote you, but:
Ok, then… have a ceiling fan above it?
A very slow one, that uses little energy?
Secondary thought! What if you attached a bunch of processor heat sink type fins to the mass? Might not be good for long term regulation, but it would smooth out temperature curves daily.
Yes but then the downside is you have a giant porcupine that will draw blood, in the middle of the room, lol.
You could buff that out a bit though?
…?
Badges of honor are not so easily dismissed.
Yes but there might be nonmasochists in the household, guests, children, pets, etc.
Not everyone is defacto down with a blood sacrifice for the Omnissiah.
Very fair. I forget my selfishness on occasion. Thank you for reminding me that I am not the center of the universe.
No need to apologize for someone else. But I appreciate the thought.
And you are absolutely right. A ceiling fan, plus a thermal mass would work.
deleted by creator
