Common joke says that heaters are 100% effient because all they make is heat. How much energy is actually lost?
In: Physics
The joke is equivocating the word efficiency as meaning both “how good it is at doing something” and “work done vs heat rejected”.
An electric heater is 0% efficient since it’s converting everything to waste heat. Maybe if you wanted to stretch real hard you could say that any noise it makes is “lost” since hearing it outside the place it’s heating would be energy that didn’t go into heat. That would be like not listening to the radio while driving to save gas. Technically true, but absolutely not significant.
A heater using fuel would have losses since combustion is never perfectly complete.
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