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 this one is…… 1600 watts. Surely this “large” room heater will be……. Siiiixxxxteen hundred watts.
Who is that? I love heat pumps too and would happily listen to someone talk about them for hours
boy are you one of today’s lucky 10,000!
What do you mean lucky 10,000?
Search YouTube or revanced or whatever other free service for Technology connections, also the alt channel Technology Connextras.
Gracias
I watched his video on renewable energy and it was awesome. That ending was very unexpected but he killed it. Thanks for the info
This man managed to make a 30 minute video about door stoppers that I watched to the end
…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
He videoed about dishwashers so hard he’s got his own line of dish detergent now.
I’m so happy he’s become an internet phenomenon that warrants reaction images now lol
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…
They’re not 100% either, they make noises and emit light. That’s loss
well considering everything over 0K emits light I guess there really is no 100% efficient electric machine
And that light? Albert Einstein.
Isn’t light heat?
No, but you can use some forms of “light” to heat things
If you want confusing specifics, light has negative absolute temperature
Yeah, that is a bit confusing, i never thought about light being an example of one of those systems. Edit: looks like this applies only to laser light because light has a temperature of an emitting body, and lazing body has negative temperature
my short interpretation would be like this
A system with negative thermodynamic temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature. If a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system.
This situation occurs because temperature is not really a measure of speed of particles, but rather a measure of entropy, and for ordinary objects entropy can increase infinitely, increasing temperature too. For systems with capped amount of states entropy reduces when energy is added, and that is negative thermodynamic temperature.
So negative temperature is more energetic than positive, and because of that it heats up positive temperature object when in contact.
Light kinda does that, but I am not sure I can come up with an explanation of how to measure its temperature and if it fits the definition
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.
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.
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.
It might output the results of a computation once in a while though
math as a side effect
That’s a funny way of spelling porn
Fun fact! Your porn machine can also be used to shitpost.
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.
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.
I don’t know why but as much as I’ve read about radiant heaters to try understanding them your random comment I read here is what it took for things to finally click into place for me. I really love those ah ha moments. Just wanted to say thank you.
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 there also visible, non heating light coming off them.?
I think that light also becomes heat again once it strikes a surface
Mostly, but not entirely.
Most thing you struggle to approach anywhere near 100% efficient, heating is a bit easier in that you can get a lot closer, but you’ll still hit limits before reaching 100%.
Saying inefficiencies are lost as heat is really a lazy simplification, inefficiencies are lost as anything It just turns out that 95% of anything is heat, from entropies perspective.
If all became heat upon striking a surface that would make lighting anything pretty impossible and most would be dark.
My oil heater makes gurgling noises so that acoustic energy is lost. It would also just heat up the room eventually, but I usually have a window open in winter so a tiny bit is lost that way.
What about a combination heater/lamp where the lamp part is just incandescence
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.
Also a question of optimizing its use
100% efficient!!! You’re using all the energy to do meaningful work!
GAH! Unless you personally disinfected them and wiped them clean of disinfectant, GAH! Know how many people play footsie with those?
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!
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.
Even if the heater’s energy partially is not wasted by a sound, it certainly is by generating magnetic field.
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn’t know I had
Is a heating element actually 100% efficient, though?
Some of the energy is converted to light.
100% of the energy is converted to light, its just in the IR spectrum.
Unless u feed the heater with AC power then you are also generating magnetic fields/radio waves…but those are also just photons (light) with a very long wavelengh…
Space heaters mostly heat by convective heating, where the heat energy is transferred from the element to the air molecules around it. This doesn’t involve infrared radiation (though in practice it is involved because any object above 0 K radiates infrared).
You reminded me of a certain video (or videos?) on quantum fields that I watched a few months back. Truly fascinating subject.
Which unless it goes out through a window would eventually be turned into heat anyway, right?
Yeah it’s still thermal radiation, us being able to see it isn’t a disqualifier :p
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Heat pumps move heat from outside to inside, and they use less energy than the amount that is brought into the insulated area, resulting in efficiency numbers over 100%. (less energy used than the amount brought inside was used to bring the inside energy levels up)
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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.
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?
No, it just means there is at least some going into heat in thermodynamic processes. Inevitable with atoms jostling in macroscopic systems.
And in case of a heater, some energy is going to be converted into light and sound and probably other stuff that I don’t know.
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
Those give off light. Still not efficient
Only if that light escapes through a window. Otherwise, it is heat.
Or chemical reactions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
