You know how you turn on an electric heater and the filament begins to glow? That is energy being converted to light, so not 100% efficient.
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Doesn’t the light turn into heat anyway as soon as it’s absorbed?
I mean if you want to go that route, we could just say that every speaker, light source, motor, etc is 100% efficient at generating heat because all of its energy output will eventually become heat.
That is also completely true, but meaningless because heat generation is not the purpose of these devices. However, if you use them in a building heated by a thermostat-controlled electric heater, you’re effectivhly running them for free.
I‘m was using two old servers with folding@home running as space heaters in the winter. I got them for dirt cheap and thought if I convert electricity into heat, I might as well do something good with it. Also nice opportunity to run a minecraft server for the kids during that time.
The visible part of the spectrum is likely going to be absorbed somewhere far away from the place you're trying to heat up. Also, I'm not educated enough to tell if there will be further losses of energy
If it’s in a room the visible radiation will still just heat up the room. If you’re using it outdoors and point it away then yeah you’ll have some waste.
Not sure if visible radiation that leaves through a transparent window will still heat up only inside the room, that what I meant. Probably should have phrased it better
Black-body radiation is an interesting argument against 100% efficiency, but couldn't you just extrapolate and argue that the emission will be converted back to heat once it stops reflecting and becomes absorbed?
That's like arguing that trickle down economics is efficient because the money eventually gets into the hands of the poor.
Not quite. Some is lost in magnetic flux and mechanical deformation. But that is a VERY small about.
Do those not end up as heat later down the line as well?
Yes, but magnetic flux causes radio waves and there isn't a guarantee these will turn into heat in the space you are heating.
Yes, but, it is also possible to achieve greater than 100% efficiency in using electrical energy for heat. You can use electricity to move heat from where you don't need it to where you want it. The amount of heat energy you move can be greater than the amount of electrical energy put into the system, so it's greater than 100% electrically efficient. It's well below 100% thermal efficiency, of course.
(he's talking about heat pumps)
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KNEW it was gonna be the technology connections video.
was literally just talking about, and recommended this video, IRL like 10 minutes ago.
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Technically, yes. Even the internal resistances outside of the heating elements eventually radiate into the space. Since the purpose is space heating, it's not a waste product and they can be roughly considered 100% efficient.
The reason heat pumps are more efficient (i.e. around 300% or more) is not that they create more heat from the same amount of energy but because they concentrate and move existing heat from one source to another.
This is correct, but it's also, it's only 100% of the heat at that point in the circuit.
Technically, using natural gas to make electricity, then sending that electricity to an electric heater would be less efficient than burning that natural gas for heat at the source.
So it depends on where you start counting from.
True, and also the transmission losses between the power plant and your outlets are also factors. I just treated the question like a high school physics one where you're allowed to disregard air resistance. lol
Yes, but a heat pump for heating is somwhere from 200% to 500% efficient.
Yes, except a heat pump is capable of being more than 100% efficient because the using the power to move heat around is more efficient than converting power directly to heat
but but muh thermodynamics
I get you are joking, but incase someone doesn't see the /s. As the top comment said it's easier to move heat around than creating it. Regardless if it's warmer or colder outside there's still energy there that we can use.
It's easier to move your clothes from the laundry basket to the wardrobe, than to go out and buy new clothes (or is it?).
Essentially all electrical devices are, in addition to whatever else they do, also basically 100% efficient space heaters. A PC running on 300 watts is doing things with that 300 watts but it all ends up as heat, the vast majority of which stays in the room. A light bulb puts out light, but little of that light leaves the house, it's all getting reflected and absorbed until it's mostly a heater in your house.
Heaters sometimes produce a little light or sound, so not 100%, but very close.
The sound will eventually dissipate in the air as heat. The light will be absorbed into surfaces, like any other radiation, as heat. Still 100%, but with a couple extra stops along the way.
All energy output will eventually become heat. Why bother measuring efficiency at all if we're counting those aftereffects?
Only heaters are a machine where the "good" output is one you want to be heat.
For other devices the heat is the bad part.
But since your goal with a heater... is to generate heat... and all energy eventually will become heat, it is close to 100% efficient.
If you can hear the heater's sound it makes in a room/area you don't want to be heating though, now it's <100% efficient as a tiny bit of energy became heat that heated the non ideal location.
There's an interesting aspect of this that I have not seen mentioned yet. While this is true you are usually better off using your residential heater rather than an electric space heater because residential heaters are frequently over 100% efficient. That is, they deliver more heat for the energy expenditure than if you had converted the energy directly by redirecting ambient heat. Heat pumps are this same principle taken to the extreme.
But there's a flip side to that as well - if you've got heat pump heating your whole home but you only really need to heat 1 room, you may be "wasting" a good chunk of that bonus efficiency.
But you can heat an area with 'better than 100% efficiency' if you use a heat pump and move heat from one place to another. Coefficients of performance (cop) of about 2.5 I think are pretty common, meaning if you put 100 watts into moving heat, the area will get 250 watts warmer.
Total amount of heat for the entire closed system does not increase over 100% of energy used to drive the heat pump. Like you said, you just moved heat around
Only in the sense of releasing heat into the surrounding environment. But for instance, an electric boiler is not 100% efficient because not all of the heat goes to the water. The heat that doesn't go to the intended recipient of the heat is treated as loss.
tl;dr, yes If you want to watch a 20 minute video about it instead of 1 word answers, https://youtu.be/V-jmSjy2ArM
Yes it does. There's no such thing as an inefficient electric heater. I'm the US they sell 2 kinds. 750w and 1500w. The differences between them are all a matter of form factor. Maybe a nice fan to circulate might be what you like though.
I so want this to be true, but dont they produce radio waves?
Yes. The end form of all energy is heat.
The problem is that heat is a high-entropy source of energy. As a result, the losses come when you try to convert all that delicious heat back into electricity (like with a steam turbine). The "efficiencies" only go one way (and I put efficiencies in quotes because, as you pointed out, getting energy into the form of heat is inevitable, whether that's the form you wanted or not)