No way a teacher wouldn’t know this!
Okay so the light bulb example can be wrong. My grandpa would heat his room with a 100 watt bulb meaning both the light and the heat were useful outputs.
I mean isn’t this wrong? It may be near 100% but there’s never 100% conversion to a single kind of energy. For example, even if it’s just a tiny faction, magnetic field convert electrical energy to kinetic energy, no?
100% of that tiny fraction still returns to heat.
Ah so we count following convertions. That clarifies things, thx.
I guess we could also say that eventually that heat will escape outdoors and be radiated back into space, a tiny fraction of that will end up on the sun, and be sent back again.
Isn’t some energy still dissipated as light instead of heat?
Which travels to a location, hits it and is eventually converted to heat.
So not a heater…but the universe.
Typically a heater is in a room, so any light doesn’t need to go further than the nearby walls
But a heater produces heat and light. The light might turn into heat later but that’s not heat from the heater. Otherwise everything is s heater and it’s all part of the same heater… the universe.
When light is absorbed by surface, the material temperature increases and remits light at a longer wave, ussually in the IR spectrum. So its safe to say all light is heat enegry.
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 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%!
We need you to get on the Haron collider asap
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?
The entropy machine has a 100% efficiency
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%.
Unless it makes a noise or a light that escapes the house
Blaming the heater for losses in the power lines doesn’t seem fair.
Well it is heat. If we count power lines as part of an electric heater I’d say that’s still effective.
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…
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.
induction losses:
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.
Main effect of a brushless motor is moving matter really fast, which, on a molecular level, is same as heating it.
math as a side effect
That’s a funny way of spelling porn
Fun fact! Your porn machine can also be used to shitpost.
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 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.
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.
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.
It might output the results of a computation once in a while though
if you dont count powering i/o devices (other heaters) (or electromagnetic wave emmiters so heaters with extra steps)
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.
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
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.
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.
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
And this one is…… 1600 watts. Surely this “large” room heater will be……. Siiiixxxxteen hundred watts.
I’m so happy he’s become an internet phenomenon that warrants reaction images now lol
…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
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn’t know I had
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.
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.
As a rule of thumb that’s fine, but it’s not precisely true. There will always be a little energy going everywhere it can.
Entropy doesn’t mean “everything turns into heat” it means everything becomes dispersed across all the possible states. Most of the possible states are possible states of heat, so that’s where most of the energy ends up, but only most. The chance that all the energy ends up as heat is similar to the chance that you turn on a heater and it heats up everything except for a small thermometer which stays mysteriously cold. Sure, most of the heat would be outside the thermometer, but you expect the thermometer to get its share of the energy. Equally you expect light and sound and gravitational potential and chemical to get their “fair share”, even if it’s a very small share.
Edit: I guess you could say all the energy would pass through heat at some point. That’s probably true, but equally you could say all the energy ends up as light at some point, and that’s probably true too, as it wobbles between possible states randomly. More usefully can ask what ratio ends up in each form before reaching a steady state (where the amount of sound turning into heat is equal to the amount of heat turning into sound)
