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While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!), not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a h
by m_eiman 4y ago
While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!), not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand.
It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it. Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the devices they supply.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIn a net heating environment, this is less of an issue than otherwise immediately obvious. A small idle electronic device making a consistent amount of heat just helps heat the house. If electricity is very expensive it would make sense to try and track down the offenders however.
- m_eiman 4y agoHopefully you have another heating system that's more efficient than direct electricity, though!
- denton-scratch 4y agoHow can any electric heating system be more "efficient" than an inefficient appliance? Inefficiency in an electrical appliance is nothing more than a measure of how good that appliance is at turning electricity into heat.
- electroly 4y agoThe others mentioned heat pumps but I'll mention that the person you replied to never said "electric" and is likely referring to gas heating.
- markus92 4y agoA heat pump?
- KiranRao0 4y agoA heat pump. Instead of using power to heat a room, you're using a (relatively) small amount of power to move heat from outside into the room.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jseutter 4y agoI had this same thought at one point and eventually learned of heat pumps. Heat pumps move heat from one spot to another, ie from outside your house to inside your house, or the other way. The point is, they move more energy than they consume. So that 1kwh of energy turned into heat by an inefficient electrical appliance could have instead been used to move 5kwh worth of heat into your home by a heat pump. Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at some point the outside air is too cold for them to work efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just now starting to see them included in new homes.
- denton-scratch 4y agoYes, I've considered getting a heat pump; for one reason and another, I can't. It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient". I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the intended output work. I suppose you could say that this heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the input work is expended on producing torque, or raising heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat; just in the wrong place. [0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the technical sense, so that "work" means displacement against a force, and a "machine" is any device for converting work from one form to another. Effiency is well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your intentions are for your machine. .
- Freestyler_3 4y agoThe efficiency is higher than input because the electricity is only used to transfer heat from one spot to another. This is when the gas gets compressed, to get to the condensing stage at the high pressure. (+after burn for optimal efficiency)
- zarzavat 4y agoAll heaters are 100% efficient in a closed system. However, your house is not a closed system. It’s a spatial region of an open system. In this context it makes sense to talk about efficiency as being lower or greater than 100%.
- sp332 4y agoIf your electricity comes from natural gas, it would be more efficient to burn the gas on-site for heat than to burn it to generate electricity, distribute the electricity, and then turn it back to heat.
- shagie 4y agoYes...ish. However, consider the greater performance scales with generators combined with the amount of useful heat that one gets out of a heat pump can be better than converting the natural gas to heat locally - even with losses on the grid. The key is that a heat pump doesn't convert electricity to heat (as a resistive heater) but rather moves heat from one spot (outside) to inside with great efficiency.
- sp332 4y agoYes, but the comment I'm replying to is about resistive heating from inefficient appliances.
- totoglazer 4y agoMost efficient to burn the gas for electricity and use that to power a heat pump.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sidewndr46 4y agoIt'd be far simpler and more efficient to use a reciprocating engine to drive a heatpump via a rotating shaft. As a bonus, you could capture the exhaust from the engine with a heat exchanger and use that to heat the house as well.
- shagie 4y agoAnother one of my "came across this in YouTube" things (started with the design of a hurricane lantern) Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now - https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI The key is the Coefficient of performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
- mort96 4y agoIn addition to what other people are saying, there's also district heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating Heat can be generated efficiently in some centralized location (from geothermal heat, power plant waste heat, solar, or whatever) and then distributed to nearby homes. There's lots of ways to heat homes in ways which use way less than 1 joule of electricity for 1 joule of heat.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIf you had a heat pump, it would be more effective to run that for sure.
- _Algernon_ 4y agoHow can heating be inefficient?
- mort96 4y agoBy generating only 1 joule of heat per 1 joule of electricity used. There are lots of much more efficient ways to heat homes.
- robonerd 4y agoBesides the matter of heat pumps which others have covered, there is also the matter of how good your heating system is at getting heat to where you actually need it. A PC under your desk will keep your toes warm, and maybe with warm toes you don't really mind the rest of the house being at 10 C / 50 F. With such space heater, you can turn down the thermostat for the entire house and only heat the parts you care about most. Furthermore there are radiative space heaters which direct infrared energy to a specific part of the room using a reflective dish, instead of heating the entire room using convection. In large rooms, radiative space heater can keep you feeling warm while using much less energy than a heatpump would require to heat the whole room.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIn the summer though heating the house is a bad thing. Either you are making your house hotter or you're making the air conditioner work harder to remove it.
- londons_explore 4y agoIn most of the world electrical heat is about 3x as expensive as the next cheapest heating (gas, coal, oil, heat pump or wood)
- esaym 4y agoEven better, just go to a pawn shop or ebay and get a used current clamp meter for cheap. Then pull the cover off of your circuit breaker box in your house and check the current draw on each and every wire.
- chrisBob 4y agoMy local library has them available to check out for free! The payback period for buying a Flir camera to do your own energy audit is likely long, but checking one out is pretty reasonable.
- giantrobot 4y ago> Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand. I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.