ELI5, How can we warm things like food up (ovens) and cool them down (freezers) with electricity?
In: Technology
Ovens create heat by burning gas or moving electricity through special wire that turns it into heat.
Freezers make things cold by a neat trick certain chemicals do, where you can pressurize and de pressurize them in such a way that they actually move a substantial amount of heat. So you can move heat from inside the freezer to outside of it, which makes it cold.
Electricity and heat are both energy, although different *forms* of energy. Heating and cooling works slightly different, though.
In an oven, electricity is converted to heat by running it through a wire with a high resistance. This causes energy losses in the form of heat, which dissipates out into the oven, heating the food. Simply put, we convert electrical energy into heat.
In a freezer, we use the electricity to run a system of pipes and valves. Through some clever engineering, we can force a liquid called refrigerant to evaporate into a gas and the condense back into a liquid. When this happens the refrigerant, because of how our universe works, *has* to take in or give away energy. By taking in energy inside the freezer and giving it away outside the freezer, we can move the heat from inside the freezer to outside the freezer. This is why the back of your freezer is warm and shouldn’t stand directly against the wall!
Edit: Spelling.
Freezers will use less energy if they’re packed. The less frozen items in there, the more energy it takes to stay cold.
Another question piggybacking off of this one. Why do we still use electricity to do stuff? We’ve been using it for like 200 years and to my knowledge nothing else has been developed. Can’t we use some other force of nature to do our bidding? Just think it’s kinda crap that everyone always complains about how we generate electricity and moving to green energy where if we developed something that wasn’t electricity to do stuff for us we wouldn’t need to produce it anymore.
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