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Not true, it is true that it is heating at %100 efficiency that is to say %100 of the electrical energy is being transferred into heat (although technically some is being transferred into IR light not necessarily what you want) but your goal is probably not to simply create heat your goal is probably to heat the room or at least yourself and their is plenty of waste heat going off into space somewhere also you can achieve more than %100 heat transfer by compressing the external air’s heat we call these heat pumps and they can achieve +400%. The key word is efficiency.
I always like to muse that in terms of electronics the heat is caused by resistance to current and that heat is usually considered inefficiency, and since no other load exist or work is done that means heating elements are about -100% efficient.
It’s always wild to me that 100% heating efficiency is actually kinda not great. Also the fact that we can use the heat from air that is colder than what we want in order to generate more heat I mean that’s just witchcraft.
Well, we’re not generating heat with heat pumps. We’re compressing atoms to make them angrier and pass other atoms by that bunch to even out the angriness. Could also substitute the world jiggy for angry.
🤓 ACKSHUALLY
It’s not possible for a heat pump - or anything - to even be 100% efficient, let alone 400%. Efficiency is measure of how much of the input energy gets converted to useful output energy, and since heat pumps don’t actually create heat the useful output is the compressor’s ability to pump refrigerant about. The Coefficient of Performance - the ratio between energy put in and useful work done - is 400% for a heat pump (give or take).
heat pumps don’t actually create heat
🤓 ACKSHUALLY
Heat pumps create a fair bit of heat due to friction and electrical resistance in the compressor.
🤓 AKSHUALLY
Energy is conserved. It is converted from another form of energy, or in this case mostly transported, not created.
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Everyone here is talking about heat pumps for being more efficient. pfft
Got one of these bad boys for my patio. Highly recommended if you wait for a sale.
Refrigeration cycle scoffs at your mere 100% efficiency
Nah this thing puts out light and probably vibrates as well, so not even 100%.
Well ultimately it all becomes heat. Maybe a tiny amount escapes a window or something. So we could say 99%.
But heat pumps still reign supreme, at least until it gets super cold.
In the end we are all infinitely falling into the pit of entropy
Speak for yourself.
Light is just heat energy
Well that’s just objectively wrong. Light is EM radiation, where heat is movement of atoms and molecules. Via incandescence objects can radiate away their heat (following black body radiation), however they are not the same thing.
What happens when photons emitted from the heater hit items in the room? That energy is imparted into the object, heating it up.
If we’re going to be pedantic, let’s do it correctly.
Even with the blinds shut, a space heater will emit a surprisingly large amount of radio waves (mine actually disrupts USB devices with a small EMP when it turns on, and anyone with an RTL-SDR can tell you those 50 Hz harmonics are rough). Some of those radio waves will penetrate the walls/blinds and a tiny fraction might escape the atmosphere and head off into space. From there some will find their way to interstellar space and potentially drift “forever” (well, until the heat death of the universe or whichever theory you subscribe to; I think at that point saying “the photon never got converted into heat energy” is a good enough approximation).
tell you those 50 Hz harmonics are rough)
Yes, nothing like a sine wave in a resistor to create those harmonics.
The heat isn’t transmitted via photons, it’s transmitted via convection. The air acts as a medium to transmit the heat energy outward. The heating element itself emits photons because it gets hot enough where the atoms within vibrate at a frequency which reaches the visible spectrum of light. That’s why cooler elements glow red (lower frequency) and hotter elements glow blue (higher frequency). Most of the heat energy is not contained in the photons, you need an output on the level of the sun to achieve that. With regards to the sun, all of the energy is carried by radiation anyway, because convective currents can’t travel in the vacuum of space.
So then you state: The light will become heat energy.
Sure, but like the other commenter said, everything turns into heat eventually
So the heater takes all energy you put into it and turns it into heat at a 100% efficiency
heat is movement of atoms and molecules.
Moving atoms don’t physically touch each other. They transfer their momentum with photons. Measuring the heat of a volume of gas is technically the measurement of the number of photon exchanges.
Wtf, is that true? Aren’t photons weightless? It’s all black magic.
and THAT’S what makes me HOT!
- Big Sweaty Guy from Bill Nye the ScienceGuy
I’m dating myself, so https://youtu.be/dFL2h2J_xaE
that probably didn’t help 😅
Refrigeration just moves heat, it does not create it.
Why create heat when you can just steal it from somewhere else, though
Why drink my milkshake when I can drink yours? I can DRINK IT UP!
In terms of “use electricity to make heat” it still trounces resistive heating. This whole thread is arguing about the definition of efficiency.
It would end up creating some due to inefficiencies, which would contribute to the heat at the end.
Well, heat pumps are significantly more efficient than traditional heaters because they move heat rather than generating it. A heat pump can deliver three to four times more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes, making them 300-400% efficient.
If you want to make heat, start up a gaming PC. At least the energy will go to doing something before it gets turned to heat.
I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.
At that point you might as well run Folding@home on your PC just to act as a heater. It’s literally a win-win for you and for society.
archiveteam is another suggestion, though more helpful to historians than health science
It’s always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of “Folding@home”. Thank you I’ll try it out.
You’re welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there’s a huge list of such “volunteer computing” projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!
Now the confession: I’m a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that’s partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn’t really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.
But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!
I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.
Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.
Based confession
You should check out the great internet mersenne prime search as well: mersenne.orgEdit: forgot to read comments first
I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!
(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)
running FFXI and later WoW on my first rig (many moons ago) allowed me to keep my room nice and balmy all winter, to the point where I’d leave a window open for much of the day during snow-supporting temps and it’d still be toasty
gaming pcs are a fuck cause they never get hot enough to warm up a cold room but they definitely make a hot room even hotter
mine is good for a few degrees in the winter but i’m in a small room with the door shut
I don’t have a source handy, but someone attempted to heat their apartment with computers and ended up spending something like >$1000 in utilities that month.
Resistive heat is expensive - that’s why heat pumps are so good.
In practice, they would have gotten identical results with any electric resistive heater. Fans, oil filled, ceramic, etc. all largely doesn’t matter as it is Wh of electricity to Wh of heat.They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.
in the uk price per kWh for electricity is over five times cost of natural gas. We all use natural gas boilers to heat water which flows through radiators to warm our rooms. Anybody who heats their house with space heaters is just throwing money away whether it’s 100% efficient or not.
You see more heatpumps these days but that’s another thing entirely
Heat pumps cap out at about
250%400% efficiency, so you’d still be spending more to run them than to burn natural gas at that ratio.Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn’t 100% efficient either. But yeah it’s a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.
Thanks for the correction, edited. How is gas not 100% efficient, though?
But yeah, heat pumps are definitely more environmentally friendly (unless you’re habitually letting the refrigerant out, o guess). The real argument is whether the extra energy is worth it for protein folding (I’d say generally no, but if you don’t have a heat pump, might as well).
Burning any fuel isn’t 100% efficient, I went out and found a website talking about it that might help
or folding@home
That is how the power supply of my Laptop look like, playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my laptop.
Winter is gaming season.
I was testing the AI image generating capabilities of a M1 MacBook Air 16GB.
It shuts down at 113°C (235°Freedom)
113ºC is hard on the limit, chips at 140ºC convert the PC in an Paperweight. Normally they desconnect the Device with >90-95º. Permit 113º is maybe related to an programmed obsolence policy from Apple.
Boo, get heat pump you loser
Stealing heat vs creating heat. It’s like comparing the price of a cinema ticket to a torrent.
Who would win in a fight? Cinema ticket or torrent?
I wouldn’t know, last time I’ve been to a cinema was in the 2010s and that wasn’t volountarily.
Ground-source heat pumps seem like they could be the new hotness. You don’t have to dig very deep before the ground is a constant temperature, so that can be used to increase the efficiency even further in extremely hot/cold weather.
Tech Ingredients did a nice little DIY experiment with it.
Most of the time, we consider heat output to be inefficient. It only works here because heat happens to be its purpose.
You could say it’s 0% efficient.
I dunno, I’m seeing some light.
Light is absorbed by materials and ultimately becomes heat.
Doesn’t everything ultimately become heat?
Yes, that is why it states “this is what peak thermodynamic performance.” In electronics people are taught that no device is 100% efficient because energy is lost as heat. A heater is 100% efficient because everything becomes heat.
Four or five?
and what happens to the energy of said photons once they interact with your retina?
You’re objectively wrong here.
Turn that entropy up to 11, boi!
People say efficient without saying efficient at doing what with what.
Make those heating coils out of superconductors and it’ll be even more efficient.
(As a nerd) I came here for the nerdy comments.
So hot.
