I was looking at an electric heater and it seems to be just some red hot wire and a fan, how can it get so hot without triggering the circuit breaker? Is it a big load? Is it something like the little filament on a lightbulb?
In: Engineering
It is exactly like the filament on a lightbulb. Technically a light bulb is a heater which not only gets red hot but white hot. And this is why we have switched to better technology which does not include a big heating element.
A heating element, resistor, light bulb, are all the same thing but in different configurations. It is a long thin wire which will have a resistance. By selecting the material of the wire to something more resistive you can get away with a shorter thicker wire which helps the heat transfer and makes the construction cheaper. In general you also want a material with a positive temperature coefficient so that when it gets hotter its resistance will increase and it will use less power. This is a safety measure which prevents the heating element from getting too hot.
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