this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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If a machine is never 100% efficient transforming energy into work because part of the energy is converted into heat, does it mean an electric heater is 100% efficient? @[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 176 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Doesn’t the light turn into heat anyway as soon as it’s absorbed?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

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.

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[–] sukhmel 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sukhmel 4 points 8 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

and that light hits stuff and gets converted to heat.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's like arguing that trickle down economics is efficient because the money eventually gets into the hands of the poor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

That's like arguing that 99% of the light off a heating element is a laser beam directed straight into deep space.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not quite. Some is lost in magnetic flux and mechanical deformation. But that is a VERY small about.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do those not end up as heat later down the line as well?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but magnetic flux causes radio waves and there isn't a guarantee these will turn into heat in the space you are heating.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 8 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

Same link with site tracking removed: https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto

I am not a bot, and this action was performed manually.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

KNEW it was gonna be the technology connections video.

was literally just talking about, and recommended this video, IRL like 10 minutes ago.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

THIS IS THE COMMENT THREAD YOU WANT TO LOOK INTO.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago

Yes, but a heat pump for heating is somwhere from 200% to 500% efficient.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

but but muh thermodynamics

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

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?).

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Heaters sometimes produce a little light or sound, so not 100%, but very close.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

All energy output will eventually become heat. Why bother measuring efficiency at all if we're counting those aftereffects?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Fun fact: this phenomenon is what causes the infamous "hot ear" effect that many people suffer from every day.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

tl;dr, yes If you want to watch a 20 minute video about it instead of 1 word answers, https://youtu.be/V-jmSjy2ArM

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I so want this to be true, but dont they produce radio waves?

[–] Tramort 6 points 8 months ago

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)

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