Thursday 17 November 2022

More science deniers

We are used to the Alarmists gaily ignoring physics in favour of their own "climate science", but now a new breed of physics deniers are abroad, trying to con people into paying well over the odds for ordinary blow heaters.

It warms 10x faster than traditional heaters
That just means it is 10x more powerful.

It barelly (sic) affects your energy bill
All direct heaters are almost 100% efficient, whether they be gas or electric. There is nowhere else for the energy to go, except as heat. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that "Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.", so it doesn't matter how whizzy or high-tech your electric heater is, it will still use the same amount of energy to raise your room from, say, 16C to, say, 20C and cost you just as much.

However, the resistance in the wires that feed your socket into which you have plugged the Eco-heat heater causes the wires to heat up, lowering the efficiency of the heater. The formula to calculate this loss is W = i^2R, where W is the heat loss, i is the current and R is the resistance of the wires. This means that, although the energy loss is small, it is proportional to the square of the current. If your heater is 10x more powerful than a normal heater, then, for a fixed voltage (for those of us who do not have access to 3-phase electricity), then your current will be 10x greater and hence your losses will be 100x greater, rendering the Eco-heat less efficient than the old blow heater that you have stuffed in a cupboard somewhere.

7 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

If the cables heat up, they are also warming the room.

Bayard said...

Only where they are in the room.

John Tee said...

Assuming the socket you are plugging a heater into is 13 amp as is typical, then the most power the heater can pull is 13 x 240v = 3.12 kW. If it is genuinely 10 times more powerful than others then the others must be 320W. Can't say I've seen many 320W heaters around.

The Jannie said...

I've used a few heaters which, no matter what the label claimed, felt as if they were 320W!

Lola said...

This prompts an 'Aga Saga'. Aga's leak about 3Kw/hr of heat. That is not wasted heat - if you want a warm room / have a big kitchen. We have found that the leaked heat is enough warm our bedroom which is over the kitchen, the adjacent dining room entered through a doorway and with an old window void (both always open), the adjacent washroom (which houses the CH/HW boiler) and the study, which is opposite the washroom. In Suffolk I reckon that Mrs L - a retired lady - needs the place NOT heated between beginning of May and the end of September. My target is to shrink that period. This year we still have not put the CH on. Mrs L spends most of her time in the kitchen (!) during the day (when she's not out and about) so she stays warm, which is important (she tells me) when you are nearly 70...

Therefore Aga's - if properly exploited - are not as inefficient as people make out.

(Oh, and it gets turned off/down very low in summer -but can be turned up for an aga-cue...)

(Oh 2 - ours is an oil fired Aga....ouch at the moment)

Bayard said...

I grew up in a house where the Aga was the only source of heat, helped out in winter by open fires, later an enormous wood-burning stove. The "leaked heat" was very much not wasted.

Bayard said...

JT, yes, that's part of the scientific illiteracy.