• stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Not true, it is true that it is heating at %100 efficiency that is to say %100 of the electrical energy is being transferred into heat (although technically some is being transferred into IR light not necessarily what you want) but your goal is probably not to simply create heat your goal is probably to heat the room or at least yourself and their is plenty of waste heat going off into space somewhere also you can achieve more than %100 heat transfer by compressing the external air’s heat we call these heat pumps and they can achieve +400%. The key word is efficiency.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      It’s always wild to me that 100% heating efficiency is actually kinda not great. Also the fact that we can use the heat from air that is colder than what we want in order to generate more heat I mean that’s just witchcraft.

    • rmuk@feddit.uk
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      5 days ago

      🤓 ACKSHUALLY

      It’s not possible for a heat pump - or anything - to even be 100% efficient, let alone 400%. Efficiency is measure of how much of the input energy gets converted to useful output energy, and since heat pumps don’t actually create heat the useful output is the compressor’s ability to pump refrigerant about. The Coefficient of Performance - the ratio between energy put in and useful work done - is 400% for a heat pump (give or take).

      • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        heat pumps don’t actually create heat

        🤓 ACKSHUALLY

        Heat pumps create a fair bit of heat due to friction and electrical resistance in the compressor.

        • untorquer@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          🤓 AKSHUALLY

          Energy is conserved. It is converted from another form of energy, or in this case mostly transported, not created.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I always like to muse that in terms of electronics the heat is caused by resistance to current and that heat is usually considered inefficiency, and since no other load exist or work is done that means heating elements are about -100% efficient.

  • Hello_there@fedia.io
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    5 days ago

    If you want to make heat, start up a gaming PC. At least the energy will go to doing something before it gets turned to heat.

    • HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.

      • motor_spirit@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        running FFXI and later WoW on my first rig (many moons ago) allowed me to keep my room nice and balmy all winter, to the point where I’d leave a window open for much of the day during snow-supporting temps and it’d still be toasty

    • jcs@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I don’t have a source handy, but someone attempted to heat their apartment with computers and ended up spending something like >$1000 in utilities that month.

      • Hello_there@fedia.io
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        5 days ago

        Resistive heat is expensive - that’s why heat pumps are so good.
        In practice, they would have gotten identical results with any electric resistive heater. Fans, oil filled, ceramic, etc. all largely doesn’t matter as it is Wh of electricity to Wh of heat.

      • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.

        • copd@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          in the uk price per kWh for electricity is over five times cost of natural gas. We all use natural gas boilers to heat water which flows through radiators to warm our rooms. Anybody who heats their house with space heaters is just throwing money away whether it’s 100% efficient or not.

          You see more heatpumps these days but that’s another thing entirely

          • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 days ago

            Heat pumps cap out at about 250% 400% efficiency, so you’d still be spending more to run them than to burn natural gas at that ratio.

            • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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              5 days ago

              Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn’t 100% efficient either. But yeah it’s a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.

              • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 days ago

                Thanks for the correction, edited. How is gas not 100% efficient, though?

                But yeah, heat pumps are definitely more environmentally friendly (unless you’re habitually letting the refrigerant out, o guess). The real argument is whether the extra energy is worth it for protein folding (I’d say generally no, but if you don’t have a heat pump, might as well).

  • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 days ago

    Most of the time, we consider heat output to be inefficient. It only works here because heat happens to be its purpose.

    You could say it’s 0% efficient.

  • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Pfftt. Splitting wood is peak heat thermodynamics. And I can attest it keeps you warm down to -40F.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    That is how the power supply of my Laptop look like, playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my laptop.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    5 days ago

    Make those heating coils out of superconductors and it’ll be even more efficient.