Heat pump could heat your house if it's near 0K "outside". Heat pumps are how we chill to near 0K anyways. And by heat pump I mean literally a window air conditioner. Replace the freon in your typical AC with helium and get a really fancy evaporator (cold head or cold finger is the trade term) and you could probably get a 10cc vial on the end to sub 70K. With vacuum and a bigger 240V window AC unit you can get near 4K. Running multiple heat pumps in stages and with liquid nitrogen as coolant for some of them and you can condense helium and push really close to 0K.

Yes, what is that motor doing? If it's a drill, it's spinning a drill bit and that drill bit generates a lot of friction when it tries to make a hole in something, and that friction generates heat. If it's spinning a tire, that tire generates a lot of friction with the road.

It goes down well below freezing here. My apartment is small.

By "well below" do you mean -30? Or do you mean -5? Either way, you must have much better insulation than I do, because I have multi-kilowatt heaters and even on not-so-cold days my poor PC can't compete, no matter how hard I game.

Very fair. I forget my selfishness on occasion. Thank you for reminding me that I am not the center of the universe.

The entropy machine has a 100% efficiency

So a bunch of the other comments have mentioned this but you would be creating a thermal battery essentially. These can be useful for smoothing out the temperature changes in that room but it isn't exactly efficient since the only way to heat or cool it is by changing the temperature at the surface of the container.

Adding passive heat sinks like radiator fins would increase the efficiency as it would absorb or diffuse the temperature difference with increased surface area but it would still would be subject to things like the air conditioning turning on and off more regularly when there is a higher ambient temperature delta or condensation when the weather is hot and moisture is high. You've essentially added an inactive water boiler tank in the middle of a room that takes up space and takes a long time to either heat up or cool down and it still would be lagging behind where you want the temperature to be.

You're on the right track to a good idea with trying to store thermal energy but it can be made better with a few tweaks:

• Let's make the tank part of an active system by adding pumps and a heat exchanger that integrates with your current air duct system (assuming you have one). We can heat and cool the tank directly instead of passively so that our time and energy is directed more efficiently.
• Insulate it so that we minimize any unwanted heat changes
• Move it to a utility room or outside so you aren't taking up room space

Now we have a thermal battery that works with your air conditioning system as opposed to against it. This can be paired with other methods of heat/cooling such as a solar system.

But if you're in a dorm or somewhere you can't make changes, it could make sense if you aren't paying for electricity, you actively heat/cool the bucket by putting it in a freezer or on a heater/fire, and you don't mind a large metal container in the middle of the room? Just watch for a lot of condensation when cooling the air.

I waited until winter to rip my DVD collection because it meant hours of high throttle on the PC.

Most of the light from a heater is infrared light though, which is absorbed as heat by the surroundings. But yeah a small percentage will be lost as some other wavelengths that might not be absorbed by anything, so it's not technically 100%, unless you round to 2sf 😅

I've seen someone do something slightly like this with a greenhouse. It had a large tank of water in the middle. It was black, so it absorbed sunlight during the day, heating the water, and then that kept the temperature up at night.

I think it also had something to do with an aquaponics setup? Like there were either fish in the tank, or in a "pond," and fish shit water would be cycled out to the plants because fertilizer?

induction losses:

Something you'll forever see now: In the United States, homes in the North have inboard chimneys and hearths. The brickwork is inside the walls for better heating in the winter. Homes in the South have outboard chimneys, so that you can cook in the summer without dying of heat stroke.

if you dont count powering i/o devices (other heaters) (or electromagnetic wave emmiters so heaters with extra steps)

As a rule of thumb that’s fine, but it’s not precisely true. There will always be a little energy going everywhere it can.

Entropy doesn’t mean “everything turns into heat” it means everything becomes dispersed across all the possible states. Most of the possible states are possible states of heat, so that’s where most of the energy ends up, but only most.
The chance that all the energy ends up as heat is similar to the chance that you turn on a heater and it heats up everything except for a small thermometer which stays mysteriously cold. Sure, most of the heat would be outside the thermometer, but you expect the thermometer to get its share of the energy. Equally you expect light and sound and gravitational potential and chemical to get their “fair share”, even if it’s a very small share.

Edit: I guess you could say all the energy would pass through heat at some point. That’s probably true, but equally you could say all the energy ends up as light at some point, and that’s probably true too, as it wobbles between possible states randomly. More usefully can ask what ratio ends up in each form before reaching a steady state (where the amount of sound turning into heat is equal to the amount of heat turning into sound)

noo get the oily greasy food away from technology 😭

So not a heater...but the universe.

Like anywhere from -15 to -4 C (around 5-25 F). I also keep it around 15 C (60 F) in my apartment to keep heating costs lower so it doesn't need to get super warm to keep my thermostat from kicking on.

Not me. I leave my power bricks at the bus station and tell them don't call until you have daddy's money.

Congrats, you've invented a radiator.

Its ok, I can come over and cut you a little bit, if you're into that.

... I've done martial arts long enough that I've literally acquired a taste for blood, having been punched in the face enough.

The resulting grease fire will increase the electrical power->heat conversion calculation to over 100%!

Typically a heater is in a room, so any light doesn't need to go further than the nearby walls

And as things degrade you remember how it was.

We need you to get on the Haron collider asap

Move it deep underground, congtats you just invented geothermal 😁

Honestly, not even that deep can used for geothermal. You can dig 6 feet deep for a horizontal ground loop in most places and still be completely usable for a ground source heatpump.

Sorry it's a sausage roll in English; it's called sausage bread in Dutch

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saucijzenbroodje

In my country gas is about 2/3rds of residential energy consumption - maybe more than as a share of residential space and water heating.

Power-line losses before your house, so a electric heater is only 96%-85% effecient. When the heating for bird feets is accounted, it's 100%.

You're assuming this heater is on grid power. We just need to power it by solar panels that are inside the house, under a skylight. Now we've got a 100% efficient heater, just don't ask about PV efficiency...

I usually issue retractions by just putting a strikethrough on the text of the comment (using double tildes [~~] on each side).

All who are chill with, and have, being punched in the face are welcome.

And you operate the power plant in your room? Why do you need a space heater then, just how cold is it there?!

Ah ok! I don't speak Dutch, but it looks like a kind of ... flakier, pastry style bread... honestly looks delicious!

Closest thing I've personally had to that would probably be a piroshki/pirogi, or maybe a calzone, but those both use more... bready breads, if that makes any sense, lol.

... so... you're saying I can rent a power brick from you?

what if you're running it directly from a generator?

What about electro-magnetic losses?

If the generator is inside the house, 100%. But then you could just burn the fuel...

Blaming the heater for losses in the power lines doesn't seem fair.

But a heater produces heat and light. The light might turn into heat later but that's not heat from the heater. Otherwise everything is s heater and it's all part of the same heater... the universe.

you could just burn the fuel...

What about heat pumps they have efficiency in the range of 200-300%

Well it is heat. If we count power lines as part of an electric heater I'd say that's still effective.

Setup sponsored by Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, to have a real toasting effect.

What are you, afraid of fire? This is progress. Cavemen were bold and progressed.

Main effect of a brushless motor is moving matter really fast, which, on a molecular level, is same as heating it.

No way a teacher wouldn't know this!

This kid is going places.

I mean isn't this wrong? It may be near 100% but there's never 100% conversion to a single kind of energy. For example, even if it's just a tiny faction, magnetic field convert electrical energy to kinetic energy, no?

Unless it makes a noise or a light that escapes the house