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
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
Search YouTube or revanced or whatever other free service for Technology connections, also the alt channel Technology Connextras.
I watched his video on renewable energy and it was awesome. That ending was very unexpected but he killed it. Thanks for the info
Gracias
This man managed to make a 30 minute video about door stoppers that I watched to the end
…HOURS???
Hours of videos about dishwashers too
He videoed about dishwashers so hard he’s got his own line of dish detergent now.
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.
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.
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 came here to see a picture of this man.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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 waited until winter to rip my DVD collection because it meant hours of high throttle on the PC.
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.
noo get the oily greasy food away from technology 😭
What are you, afraid of fire? This is progress. Cavemen were bold and progressed.
The resulting grease fire will increase the electrical power->heat conversion calculation to over 100%!
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?
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.
Isn’t there also visible, non heating light coming off them.?
What about a combination heater/lamp where the lamp part is just incandescence
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
what if you’re running it directly from a generator?
If the generator is inside the house, 100%. But then you could just burn the fuel…
you could just burn the fuel…
What about heat pumps they have efficiency in the range of 200-300%
Heat pumps move heat around, whereas radiators create it.
The “efficiency” of heatpumps relates to heat they import into a system for a given amount of power, compared to creating heat with that power. They are not generating that heat. They are moving it.
Similarly, it’s much more energy efficient to use a wheelbarrow to collect ice and move it inside, than it is to make ice cubes in freezer.
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.
I’ve seen someone do something slightly like this with a greenhouse. It had a large tank of water in the middle. It was black, so it absorbed sunlight during the day, heating the water, and then that kept the temperature up at night.
I think it also had something to do with an aquaponics setup? Like there were either fish in the tank, or in a “pond,” and fish shit water would be cycled out to the plants because fertilizer?
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.
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.
Congrats, you’ve invented a radiator.
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.
Something you’ll forever see now: In the United States, homes in the North have inboard chimneys and hearths. The brickwork is inside the walls for better heating in the winter. Homes in the South have outboard chimneys, so that you can cook in the summer without dying of heat stroke.
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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 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.
Or light.
Most of the light from a heater is infrared light though, which is absorbed as heat by the surroundings. But yeah a small percentage will be lost as some other wavelengths that might not be absorbed by anything, so it’s not technically 100%, unless you round to 2sf 😅
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
What about electro-magnetic losses?
