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Noctua pitches its PC fans as home heating boosters — active fans beat natural convection
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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It’s only marginally better. I bet there’s a lot of YouTube videos from nerds that can give you the math.
I can't speak for that specific fan but in general a fan boosts heating by a lot. It was a game changer for me.
Depends in radiator design. Forced connection will generally transfer more heat than natural convection in an open system like this. This depends on whether the fan is actually pushing more air than would move under natural convection, and how much. There's other considerations such as radiator material, surface finish and color, etc. which may throttle the effect.
It depends.
One of the problems with many radiators is that they heat a relatively small amount of air to a high temperature. Hot air then rises. This creates a warm layer up a ceiling height but leaves it cooler at lower levels. By using forced airflow, you can heat a larger amount of air to a lower temperature. This results in a more even distribution of heat.
This is also why ceiling fans can help in the winter. They can stir the hot air back down into the rest of the room.
The only flaw I can see here is the fan's direction. It's pushing hot air up. A radiator cover that redirects it sideways would make a significant difference.
It's going to depend a lot on your design and flow, but I recall the free convection coefficient being an order of magnitude smaller, but it's a linear relationship between energy transfered and the coefficient.
Anecdotally, I have 4 5015 blower fans that move air under the heated bed of my larger 3d printer, easily saw a difference of 10-15c chamber temperatures with those compared with free convection.