Refrigeration cycle scoffs at your mere 100% efficiency
Refrigeration just moves heat, it does not create it.
Why create heat when you can just steal it from somewhere else, though
“Waste heat” is a relative term.
Why drink my milkshake when I can drink yours? I can DRINK IT UP!
It would end up creating some due to inefficiencies, which would contribute to the heat at the end.
In terms of “use electricity to make heat” it still trounces resistive heating. This whole thread is arguing about the definition of efficiency.
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.
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.
Well, we’re not generating heat with heat pumps. We’re compressing atoms to make them angrier and pass other atoms by that bunch to even out the angriness. Could also substitute the word jiggy for angry.
And since very little heat is generated, we don’t further heat up our planet. Not much, anyway. electricity generation is another issue if it’s fossil based, but at least less is used.
Huh, so what if the jiggy atoms come in contact with batman atoms?
Then Batman is going to have to get jiggy with it.
Na-na na-na nana?

bAtMaN
Superman tries to shake off Batman, but Batman just smiles and tenses his anus even more…
I get that(enough, anyway, I just need to watch some videos on them to be honest) but it’s still super wild to say out loud.
Which part, getting jiggy wit it or the witchcraft?
🤓 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).
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.
🤓 AKSHUALLY
Energy is conserved. It is converted from another form of energy, or in this case mostly transported, not created.
Heat and energy are not the same thing, scrub. You can create heat no problem.
Fuck me, every time with this “useful heat” bs…
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.
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ir light is heat dawg
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.
I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.
At that point you might as well run Folding@home on your PC just to act as a heater. It’s literally a win-win for you and for society.
It’s always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of “Folding@home”. Thank you I’ll try it out.
You’re welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there’s a huge list of such “volunteer computing” projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!
Now the confession: I’m a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that’s partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn’t really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.
But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!
I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.
Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.
Based confession
You should check out the great internet mersenne prime search as well: mersenne.orgEdit: forgot to read comments first
I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!
(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)
archiveteam is another suggestion, though more helpful to historians than health science
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
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.
They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.
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
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.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.
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).
Burning any fuel isn’t 100% efficient, I went out and found a website talking about it that might help
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.
Everyone here is talking about heat pumps for being more efficient. pfft

Got one of these bad boys for my patio. Highly recommended if you wait for a sale.
not gonna lie I yearn for a future where its not a joke but I was born too early
Make it so!
you really should not talk about your MIL like this
I don’t think my it will fit on my porch.
Boo, get heat pump you loser
Well, heat pumps are significantly more efficient than traditional heaters because they move heat rather than generating it. A heat pump can deliver three to four times more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes, making them 300-400% efficient.
rather than
generating itconverting it from power
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.
I dunno, I’m seeing some light.
Light is absorbed by materials and ultimately becomes heat.
Doesn’t everything ultimately become heat?
Yes, that is why it states “this is what peak thermodynamic performance.” In electronics people are taught that no device is 100% efficient because energy is lost as heat. A heater is 100% efficient because everything becomes heat.
Four or five?
and what happens to the energy of said photons once they interact with your retina?
Pfft. Making things hotter is easy. The fact that we can regularly make things colder and hold them at that colder temperature is what’s actually impressive in thermodynamics
Pfft the absolute human hubris to hold up these entropic sleight-of-hand tricks as impressive. Nature abhors a refrigerator. Heaters are the ultimate power in the universe.
Our entire existence is a temporary rebellion against entropy. In light of that, hubris seems inevitable. I reckon a little bit of it is useful for us
You inspired me
I do not fear the motion of my feet. Though every step be toward the final bourn, I see no path to orderly retreat. The energy assigned in brief to me No art preserves, no science can reform. And so I boldly choose what is to be The range and purpose of my tiny mete. I will not, while I can, myself pre-mourn, But rage, rage against the rising of the heat.
People say efficient without saying efficient at doing what with what.
Make those heating coils out of superconductors and it’ll be even more efficient.
Pfftt. Splitting wood is peak heat thermodynamics. And I can attest it keeps you warm down to -40F.
That is how the power supply of my Laptop look like, playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my laptop.

Winter is gaming season.
I was testing the AI image generating capabilities of a M1 MacBook Air 16GB.
It shuts down at 113°C (235°Freedom)
113ºC is hard on the limit, chips at 140ºC convert the PC in an Paperweight. Normally they desconnect the Device with >90-95º. Permit 113º is maybe related to an programmed obsolence policy from Apple.
I don’t think that’s planned obsolescence. The limits on laptops are usually higher than the limit on desktop PCs.
And I had a ~110°C threshold as well on a Dell laptop running Linux, so it’s not just 'a Apple thing.
It’s because an silicon chip, which with 140ºC begins to degrade, the reason why they use an thermic security which desconnect the device on critical temperatures, but even so 110º isdefinitively to much and also will degrade the chip if it ocurred repeated times.
My cat agrees.
So does our Colombian red tail boa! :D
EDIT: That’s just a little heat coil with a fan though in the cold months. Be very careful and research heavily before blasting IR light at reptiles!
(As a nerd) I came here for the nerdy comments.















