If efficiency for electric devices is defined as how well it converts electric power into the desired effect, the rest usually being heat, aren’t electric heaters 100% efficient? If i had a 99% efficient heater, what undesired form of energy would the 1% go to? I see a lot of electric heaters being marketed as “way more efficient than others”.
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“Efficient” electric heater is mainly marketing term for low power heater. It’s “efficient”, because it barely does anything.
However, heat pump electric heater, is legitimately more efficient than resistance electric heater, because instead of just creating heat, it works on principle of moving heat from outside to inside (basically air conditioner backwards), which is indeed more efficient.
>…aren’t electric heaters 100% efficient?
i could heat a home with an arc welder but the costs would be astronomical. on the other hand i could buy an oil-filled heater and use a small amount of electricity to heat the oil and it would continue providing heat even when the electricity has been turned off.
heating objects, not air, is generally the most efficient way to go.
heat is usually a byproduct of chemical reaction/combustion
which means there’s always energy not being used to generate heat
but electrical potential energy can be just converted into heat very well
w/o doing other work like heavy lifting things etc
yeah so how much an electrical appliance can do nothing and waste energy into heat turns out to be a good thing here
100% efficiency is not a good number for heating with electricity. It is what you can get if you just use a resistive element.
There are more efficient ways to heat something, it is but using electricity to move heat on a heat pump. An AC and a refrigerator are heat pumps. A heat pump you use to heat up a house is an AC in reverse and many systems can be used in either direction.
You move the heat from outside air, ground, bedrock or water into the house. The source can be colder than the inside temperature. Taking the heat from something that is not the outside air result in a source that have a relative stable temperature all around the year.
The efficiency depends on the diffrence between the in and outside. It can be 500% for a good system and not to cold outside conditions.. So you get out 5x the same amount of heat compared to if you use use a resistive heater.
So heating something with electricity is one case where 100% efficient is not very god at all.
There are losses in electric heating–ohmic losses in wires outside the area you are trying to heat, generation of the electricity at the power plant, some energy is converted to visible light, etc.
However, from an energy point of view you are pretty much correct that electric heating is almost 100% efficient. It is actually rather easy to convert energy into heat which is usually the waste energy that makes other conversions NOT 100% efficient.
When talking about efficiency of heating we are usually looking at the energy cost to provide a change in temperature. In this case, electric heaters are not very efficient since the same change in temperature can usually be done cheaper through other means like heat pumps and even gas furnaces (which are not 100% efficient in converting their fuel energy into heat).
It is mostly marketing.
You can argue that heater fans are more effective as they are faster at making the entire room warmer.
Or you can take a small heater fan that keeps you warm in your favorite chair, but does not heat the rest of the room. That does make it more efficient at keeping you warm, compared to trying to warm the entire room.
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