this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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As many people said, it depends on your system. Some highly efficient central heating can have greater than 100% efficiency, so a space heater MIGHT be more expensive than the central heating unit.
Typically a better way to keep the cost lower is to set your home's thermostat to a lower, but still home safe number, like ~55 degrees F (~15 degrees C) and then use a smaller space heater in the room you are using, or just bundle up with hot tea/blankets/sweaters, but allowing your house to get much colder than that might not be good for your appliances, furniture, pipes, etc.
Depending on how much you want to invest, you can upgrade to a mini-split HVAC system and keep each zone of your home at a different temperature based on needs, and it can be far more efficient (and safer) than managing space heaters.
How's that supposed to work? What values are being compared? As a general engineering principle, I thought all transformations include at least a little loss.
Because in the most efficient systems, you aren't creating heat, you're moving heat.
https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto
Just as a made up example - with a space heater, you could get 1000 watts of heat from 1000 watts of electricity, or you can move 1500 watts of heat with 1000 watts of electricity with a heat pump.
It's pretty neat.
The heat pump in my home has an SCOP of 4.9 under perfect conditions and ~3.5 under normal conditions, which means 1kW of electricity in equals 3.5-4.9kW of heat out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7J52mDjZzto
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ohh okay, well yeah if you count heat pumps that's another story. I was only thinking in terms of energy generation (usually from burning something or electrical resistance).
Thanks for the video, I think I saw that channel once and it was interesting so I look forward to watching it later. It's been a long time since my thermochem course so it'll be good to revisit some concepts.
If they are speaking about heat pumps then they are technically correct. A heat pump uses energy to move heat from one location to another instead of converting heat from form to form. It's the conversion that causes inefficiency.
I'm not nearly smart enough to properly explain the physics of it but there are plenty of articles and YouTube videos available if you want to go down that rabbit hole.