A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
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
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.
Resistive heaters still suck though
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
They're not 100% either, they make noises and emit light. That's loss
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.
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'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
Isn't some energy still dissipated as light instead of heat?
Which travels to a location, hits it and is eventually converted to heat.
Yep, every electric device is a toaster, some are just super inefficient at it.
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.
Even if the heater's energy partially is not wasted by a sound, it certainly is by generating magnetic field.
induction losses:
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
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.....
