its the Potis Meme!
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.
It might output the results of a computation once in a while though
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.
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.
A heat pump will drop to 100% efficiency in cold enough weather.
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn’t know I had
I’m not an expert but, would it be that one kind of energy can’t be 100% transformed to just one other kind of energy? That in any translation the result is always more than one kind of energy?
Even if the heater’s energy partially is not wasted by a sound, it certainly is by generating magnetic field.
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.
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
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)
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 that say that heat pumps are >100% efficient…
Did someone say heat pumps?
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.
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
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.
The amazing ability of a Midwestern to talk about the most mundane shit for hours and not lose you is a magic super power.
Hours of videos about dishwashers too
I came here to see a picture of this man.
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.
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.
Name? Favorite link?
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
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.
Those give off light. Still not efficient
The air around it will expand and move, too.
More fun than the losses from the heat glow… because can argue if that really is a loss or a feature
Yeah, this is why it makes me irate that my oven automatically turns off the light when I open the door. If the oven is on, let me turn off the light if I want it off. The light and the “waste” heat from the light are both useful.
Odd design choice. My oven turns the light on when the door is opened (in addition to a manual option). Maybe somebody “repaired” your oven at some point and replaced the door switch for the light with the wrong type? I had to be aware of this when I replaced a similar switch connected to a relay that turned a light on in a closet when you opened the door. I don’t remember the specific jargon at the moment, but it boiled down to whether or not the switch was open or closed by the action of depressing the switch. I think the language might have been something like normally open or normally closed.
I assume they had a typo and said that the light goes off when they open the door, but they meant it goes off when they close the door.
I should have said it’s on when open, but turns off every time I close it whether the oven is on or not. So if I’m baking and turn on the light when I’m preheating, then I open the door to put the food in and close it to cook it, the light is then turned off automatically. Then I need to turn it back on, so I can keep an eye on things. And if I have to open the door during the baking process—like to flip something—it’s turned back off again when I close the door, and I have to turn it back on again.
I’d have no problem if it’s this when the oven was off. But when it’s on, it’s pointless.
It will still lose some energy on the wires.
As heat
Probably not heating what you want.
Unless your heater’s cable is ridiculously long, it’ll be in the right area. The wires in the wall aren’t part of the heater and don’t factor into its efficiency.
Don’t you plug your 50 meter long cord in outside, run it though all the stuff you never want hot and then into the window to run your space heater? I mean if you are heating a room, why would the plug be in that same room?
Fine for electrical efficiency, but in terms of fuel efficiency I can get into an odd situation where I burn the same amount of (say methane) gas in my room, vs in a remote power station (where we might assume any heat losses are not useful). I could end up getting more useful heat out of the same fuel using a nominally less efficient gas heater vs an electric one.
Ah yes, clearly you should burn coal/natural gas/fissionable material in your home. Very reasonable.
