How efficient are household appliances on average, in terms of how much electricity they use versus waste due to heat etc?
In: Engineering
That varies greatly by device and how you define their efficiency. In the end all energy you don’t store somewhere will eventually become heat. The “usefull things” they do for you are basically just an intermediate step. This is simply a result of conservation of energy.
The most usefull efficiency you can define compares your devices to other devices doing the same job
Like, the motor in your mixer is propably 90% efficient at turning electricity to rotation, but the rotation energy is “wasted” by just spinning and shredding food (eventually heating it too) and can’t be reused. So you should only consider the total energy needed to solve your task.
And then there is stuff like electrical heating wich is in theory 100% efficient but is still considered inefficient because it’s better to simply burn gas directly instead of burning it in a powerplant and transporting the energy to you. And if you want electrical heating a heatpump can beat the 100% efficiency by making outside heat usefull
you can look this up for things like lightbulbs. the box usually just has a letter grade, but look up the model and hopefully they’ll tell you how many lux/lumens they output per watt, or how much % of the electricity is turned into light
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