Refrigeration cycle scoffs at your mere 100% efficiency
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Nah this thing puts out light and probably vibrates as well, so not even 100%.
Well ultimately it all becomes heat. Maybe a tiny amount escapes a window or something. So we could say 99%.
But heat pumps still reign supreme, at least until it gets super cold.
Light is just heat energy
Well that's just objectively wrong. Light is EM radiation, where heat is movement of atoms and molecules. Via incandescence objects can radiate away their heat (following black body radiation), however they are not the same thing.
What happens when photons emitted from the heater hit items in the room? That energy is imparted into the object, heating it up.
If we're going to be pedantic, let's do it correctly.
Even with the blinds shut, a space heater will emit a surprisingly large amount of radio waves (mine actually disrupts USB devices with a small EMP when it turns on, and anyone with an RTL-SDR can tell you those 50 Hz harmonics are rough). Some of those radio waves will penetrate the walls/blinds and a tiny fraction might escape the atmosphere and head off into space. From there some will find their way to interstellar space and potentially drift "forever" (well, until the heat death of the universe or whichever theory you subscribe to; I think at that point saying "the photon never got converted into heat energy" is a good enough approximation).
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So then you state: The light will become heat energy.
Sure, but like the other commenter said, everything turns into heat eventually
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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.
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🤓 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.
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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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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
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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.
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.
They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.
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Boo, get heat pump you loser
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.
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.
Pfftt. Splitting wood is peak heat thermodynamics. And I can attest it keeps you warm down to -40F.
(As a nerd) I came here for the nerdy comments.
Turn that entropy up to 11, boi!
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