Isn’t some energy still dissipated as light instead of heat?
Which travels to a location, hits it and is eventually converted to heat.
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.
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
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Also a question of optimizing its use
100% efficient!!! You’re using all the energy to do meaningful work!
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Useful? No, mainly because you need circulation of the air to feel it.
I didn’t downvote you, but:
Ok, then… have a ceiling fan above it?
A very slow one, that uses little energy?
Secondary thought! What if you attached a bunch of processor heat sink type fins to the mass? Might not be good for long term regulation, but it would smooth out temperature curves daily.
Yes but then the downside is you have a giant porcupine that will draw blood, in the middle of the room, lol.
You could buff that out a bit though?
…?
Badges of honor are not so easily dismissed.
Yes but there might be nonmasochists in the household, guests, children, pets, etc.
Not everyone is defacto down with a blood sacrifice for the Omnissiah.
Very fair. I forget my selfishness on occasion. Thank you for reminding me that I am not the center of the universe.
No need to apologize for someone else. But I appreciate the thought.
And you are absolutely right. A ceiling fan, plus a thermal mass would work.
Electronics teachers generally clarify “other than resistive heaters”
Every electric device is a heater. Some just do other things too.
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.
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.
math as a side effect
That’s a funny way of spelling porn
Fun fact! Your porn machine can also be used to shitpost.
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?
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.
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.
It might output the results of a computation once in a while though
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.
Aren’t computers damn near 100 percent efficient heaters?
No, they’re damn near as power-efficient as electric space heaters though if I’m not mistaken, but these are not 100% efficient.
Forgive me for being argumentative, not my intention to be combative but now that I’m thinking more about it, isn’t everything a 100% efficient heater? Like sound hits an object, and is turned into heat. Light hits an object and is turned into heat. Electricity travels down a wire and is turned into heat(usually).
Or light.
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.
Wait. Hold my beer.
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
Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%
Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn’t know I had
Any resistance heater, but the most efficient ≠ the most cost effective.
Isn’t there also visible, non heating light coming off them.?
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.
I think that light also becomes heat again once it strikes a surface
Mostly, but not entirely.
Most thing you struggle to approach anywhere near 100% efficient, heating is a bit easier in that you can get a lot closer, but you’ll still hit limits before reaching 100%.
Saying inefficiencies are lost as heat is really a lazy simplification, inefficiencies are lost as anything It just turns out that 95% of anything is heat, from entropies perspective.
If all became heat upon striking a surface that would make lighting anything pretty impossible and most would be dark.
What about a combination heater/lamp where the lamp part is just incandescence
I’m not an expert but, would it be that one kind of energy can’t be 100% transformed to just one other kind of energy? That in any translation the result is always more than one kind of energy?
No, it just means there is at least some going into heat in thermodynamic processes. Inevitable with atoms jostling in macroscopic systems.
And in case of a heater, some energy is going to be converted into light and sound and probably other stuff that I don’t know.
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
I’m so happy he’s become an internet phenomenon that warrants reaction images now lol
And this one is…… 1600 watts. Surely this “large” room heater will be……. Siiiixxxxteen hundred watts.
…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
He videoed about dishwashers so hard he’s got his own line of dish detergent now.
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.
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.
I came here to see a picture of this man.
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.
Name? Favorite link?
TechnologyConnections yt channel. I see his video on dishwashers mentioned a lot.
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…
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
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
