It’s a silly thing, but if it glows orange, and if any of that orange light escapes or is visible from the window, it is not 100% efficient. But this is just pedantic in reality, even cheap heaters will do a good job of converting electricity into heat.

His videos are why I got a heat pump water heater instead of a standard one when mine died. I figure in summer I can hook the exhaust duct up to my hvac and get a bit of free air conditioning out of it, since I don't have AC yet. Tiny extra bonus piped straight to my bedroom.

Isn't light heat?

Hey that's the guy I see once a year at Christmas time!

No, but you can use some forms of "light" to heat things

If you want confusing specifics, light has negative absolute temperature

And that light? Albert Einstein.

Coming down your chimney?

This man managed to make a 30 minute video about door stoppers that I watched to the end

Or chemical reactions.

Yup, that little buzz / hum is technically lost energy

Even if the heater's energy partially is not wasted by a sound, it certainly is by generating magnetic field.

I came here to see a picture of this man.

No he'll be criticizing your choice of Christmas string lights, or lack thereof.

Well, if you want to go all “technically” on this, then that sound technically dissipates as heat when it is absorbed by the interior of the room.

Don't you plug your 50 meter long cord in outside, run it though all the stuff you never want hot and then into the window to run your space heater? I mean if you are heating a room, why would the plug be in that same room?

Isn't there also visible, non heating light coming off them.?

I think that light also becomes heat again once it strikes a surface

Strictly speaking that's not efficiency, but a coefficient of performance.

And funny enough the work energy doesn't even have to be electricity. It's actually mechanical energy, that is required and you could even power a heat pump with a steam or diesel engine.

Some of it does. Most of it even, but not all of it

Mostly, but not entirely.

Most thing you struggle to approach anywhere near 100% efficient, heating is a bit easier in that you can get a lot closer, but you’ll still hit limits before reaching 100%.

Saying inefficiencies are lost as heat is really a lazy simplification, inefficiencies are lost as anything
It just turns out that 95% of anything is heat, from entropies perspective.

Remember: Every device is a smoke machine if you use it wring enough.

Also: Every electrical device is filled with smoke and the job of electricians is to stop the smoke from escaping, which would render the device useless.

Fine for electrical efficiency, but in terms of fuel efficiency I can get into an odd situation where I burn the same amount of (say methane) gas in my room, vs in a remote power station (where we might assume any heat losses are not useful). I could end up getting more useful heat out of the same fuel using a nominally less efficient gas heater vs an electric one.

I watched his video on renewable energy and it was awesome. That ending was very unexpected but he killed it. Thanks for the info

The correct technical term is magic smoke.

Today I learned

Ah yes, clearly you should burn coal/natural gas/fissionable material in your home. Very reasonable.

Every electric device is a heater. Some just do other things too.

Software engineers fixing a prod-down bug on Friday afternoons operate at 100%

Why not? My underestanding is that 100% energy of a sound wave will ultimately be transformed to kinetic energy to particles in the room, be it a wall's, an ear drum's or air's.

Thanks for giving me flashbacks I didn't know I had

I'm not an expert but, would it be that one kind of energy can't be 100% transformed to just one other kind of energy? That in any translation the result is always more than one kind of energy?

A brushless motor only converts ~5% of its input to heat. That's low enough that you can reasonably call it a side effect.

Now, a computer, that's a heater that happens to produce math as a side effect. 100% of its input ends up as heat.

A heat pump will drop to 100% efficiency in cold enough weather.

What about a combination heater/lamp where the lamp part is just incandescence

What do you mean lucky 10,000?

https://xkcd.com/1053/

My oil heater makes gurgling noises so that acoustic energy is lost. It would also just heat up the room eventually, but I usually have a window open in winter so a tiny bit is lost that way.

I love firing up my PC and gaming on cold winter nights. A well placed fan or two and I can spread it through my entire apartment and the heat won't kick on all night. Ends up saving me money, my heater costs way more than my PC to run.

If all became heat upon striking a surface that would make lighting anything pretty impossible and most would be dark.

Yeah, that is a bit confusing, i never thought about light being an example of one of those systems. Edit: looks like this applies only to laser light because light has a temperature of an emitting body, and lazing body has negative temperature

It all becomes heat eventually in the end though. Sometimes it's just a multi step complex process outside the physical bounds of the heater.

Wait a sec, is the universe just God's space heater?

It might output the results of a computation once in a while though

its the Potis Meme!

God I spent too much time arguing with people who say that heat pumps are >100% efficient...

In god’s universe it is winter and that’s why the earth is heating up. It says so right in Ecclesiasties. Boom, toasted climate change nerds.

Any resistance heater, but the most efficient ≠ the most cost effective.

Also a question of optimizing its use

No, it just means there is at least some going into heat in thermodynamic processes. Inevitable with atoms jostling in macroscopic systems.

Hehe yes, we called it "magic smoke" in the early days of my engineering studies. Devices run on magic smoke so they stop working if the magic escapes.