this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 46 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

Not true, it is true that it is heating at %100 efficiency that is to say %100 of the electrical energy is being transferred into heat (although technically some is being transferred into IR light not necessarily what you want) but your goal is probably not to simply create heat your goal is probably to heat the room or at least yourself and their is plenty of waste heat going off into space somewhere also you can achieve more than %100 heat transfer by compressing the external air's heat we call these heat pumps and they can achieve +400%. The key word is efficiency.

[–] Soup@lemmy.world 23 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It’s always wild to me that 100% heating efficiency is actually kinda not great. Also the fact that we can use the heat from air that is colder than what we want in order to generate more heat I mean that’s just witchcraft.

[–] Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Well, we're not generating heat with heat pumps. We're compressing atoms to make them angrier and pass other atoms by that bunch to even out the angriness. Could also substitute the world jiggy for angry.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

🤓 ACKSHUALLY

It's not possible for a heat pump - or anything - to even be 100% efficient, let alone 400%. Efficiency is measure of how much of the input energy gets converted to useful output energy, and since heat pumps don't actually create heat the useful output is the compressor's ability to pump refrigerant about. The Coefficient of Performance - the ratio between energy put in and useful work done - is 400% for a heat pump (give or take).

[–] Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

heat pumps don't actually create heat

🤓 ACKSHUALLY

Heat pumps create a fair bit of heat due to friction and electrical resistance in the compressor.

[–] untorquer@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

🤓 AKSHUALLY

Energy is conserved. It is converted from another form of energy, or in this case mostly transported, not created.

Everyone here is talking about heat pumps for being more efficient. pfft

[–] yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 147 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Refrigeration cycle scoffs at your mere 100% efficiency

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 55 points 14 hours ago (12 children)

Nah this thing puts out light and probably vibrates as well, so not even 100%.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 38 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Well ultimately it all becomes heat. Maybe a tiny amount escapes a window or something. So we could say 99%.

But heat pumps still reign supreme, at least until it gets super cold.

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 10 points 12 hours ago

In the end we are all infinitely falling into the pit of entropy

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[–] Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Refrigeration just moves heat, it does not create it.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It would end up creating some due to inefficiencies, which would contribute to the heat at the end.

[–] Fingolfin@lemmynsfw.com 19 points 11 hours ago

Well, heat pumps are significantly more efficient than traditional heaters because they move heat rather than generating it. A heat pump can deliver three to four times more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes, making them 300-400% efficient.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

That is how the power supply of my Laptop look like, playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my laptop.

[–] Nikls94@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

I was testing the AI image generating capabilities of a M1 MacBook Air 16GB.

It shuts down at 113°C (235°Freedom)

[–] Hello_there@fedia.io 50 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

If you want to make heat, start up a gaming PC. At least the energy will go to doing something before it gets turned to heat.

[–] HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 31 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 32 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

At that point you might as well run Folding@home on your PC just to act as a heater. It's literally a win-win for you and for society.

[–] moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 36 minutes ago

archiveteam is another suggestion, though more helpful to historians than health science

I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!

(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)

[–] HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 8 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

It's always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of "Folding@home". Thank you I'll try it out.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

You're welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there's a huge list of such "volunteer computing" projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects

So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!

Now the confession: I'm a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that's partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn't really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.

But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!

[–] ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.

Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.

[–] bigboitricky@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago

Based confession

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[–] jcs@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I don't have a source handy, but someone attempted to heat their apartment with computers and ended up spending something like >$1000 in utilities that month.

[–] Hello_there@fedia.io 4 points 8 hours ago

Resistive heat is expensive - that's why heat pumps are so good.
In practice, they would have gotten identical results with any electric resistive heater. Fans, oil filled, ceramic, etc. all largely doesn't matter as it is Wh of electricity to Wh of heat.

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.

[–] copd@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

in the uk price per kWh for electricity is over five times cost of natural gas. We all use natural gas boilers to heat water which flows through radiators to warm our rooms. Anybody who heats their house with space heaters is just throwing money away whether it's 100% efficient or not.

You see more heatpumps these days but that's another thing entirely

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Heat pumps cap out at about ~~250%~~ 400% efficiency, so you'd still be spending more to run them than to burn natural gas at that ratio.

[–] spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn't 100% efficient either. But yeah it's a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for the correction, edited. How is gas not 100% efficient, though?

But yeah, heat pumps are definitely more environmentally friendly (unless you're habitually letting the refrigerant out, o guess). The real argument is whether the extra energy is worth it for protein folding (I'd say generally no, but if you don't have a heat pump, might as well).

[–] moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 25 minutes ago* (last edited 25 minutes ago)

Burning any fuel isn't 100% efficient, I went out and found a website talking about it that might help

further reading

[–] ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 26 points 14 hours ago

Boo, get heat pump you loser

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

Turn that entropy up to 11, boi!

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Most of the time, we consider heat output to be inefficient. It only works here because heat happens to be its purpose.

You could say it's 0% efficient.

[–] credo@lemmy.world 30 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

I dunno, I’m seeing some light.

[–] unrealMinotaur@sh.itjust.works 13 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Light is absorbed by materials and ultimately becomes heat.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 5 points 13 hours ago

Doesn't everything ultimately become heat?

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[–] jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 hours ago

You're objectively wrong here.

[–] betanumerus@lemmy.ca 8 points 14 hours ago

People say efficient without saying efficient at doing what with what.

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