Quote:
Originally Posted by John Mercier
It is because their minds are failing to grasp a concept.
Stating that the LED and incandescent produce light in two different ways is correct... but then not equating that a convection heater and radiant heater produce heat in two different ways is failing to grasp the concept.
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Then please explain your "concept" in more detail so we can understand better.
My "flawed" understanding is that an LED light produces light by passing DC current through a semiconductor junction, which releases photons as a reaction of this DC current flow. Additional circuitry exists in the bulb itself, or an outboard power supply that rectifies the AC current we get from a power outlet, and steps it down to a lower voltage, as one of the many characteristics of the typical semiconductor junction is that they are generally limited to a forward supply voltage of a few volts at most.
An incandescent bulb utilizes AC current directly, with no additional rectification or step-down, to heat a filament to the point that it glows white-hot, emitting light. For most practical purposes, the 120V light bulb is really a heater that has a convenient side effect of producing light.
We won't get into gas-based bulbs here, but we can also use electricity to produce light by ioinizing gasses like neon, argon, etc. to produce light in various colors.
All of these various methods of producing light use very different principles at their core to produce light, and thus will have very different efficiency ratings in terms of how many lumens of output are created for a given power consumption (wattage).
Unlike the light bulbs, all of the electric heaters being discussed in this thread are producing heat by using resistance. Unlike the various methods we have to product light from an electrical current flow, we do not have many options when it comes to producing heat from electrical current flow, they pretty much all come down to resistance (again, to be clear, I'm talking about creating heat here, not moving it, as in a heat pump).
By selecting different materials for the resistors that comprise a plug-in electrical heater, we can create our heat output in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as in the infrared part of the spectrum, but for the purposes of discussion here, they are all the same efficiency (~100%), since they are all using the same basic principles of heat as a by product of electrical resistance, and we have had ~100% efficient electric heaters for over a century, and in this form of a system we cannot get more than 100% efficient without violating the laws of physics, so our only practical options for bringing new forms of electric heaters to market would be to make one that was LESS efficient than the ones we developed a century ago.
Ergo, all heaters that are rated for a given wattage will produce the same amount of heat over a given time period (unless of course someone has decided to bring to market a less efficient heater in some way).
All of these perfectly equal heaters may utilize different methods to conduct the heat into the room, and these various methods may make them more or less optimal for certain use cases, but in the end, if you have a room that is at 65 degrees and you want to heat that room to 70 degrees, it will cost you the same amount of electricity/money to do so with any electric heater on the market today.
All of this of course is stated in the context that these discussions were born out of, which is saving significant heating costs over the course of a month, or a heating season.
If a user merely wishes to warm up briefly, such as in coming in from the cold outdoors, then I would agree that an infrared heater would be a better choice of the many equally efficient electric heaters available, as it would allow the user to better direct that heat output specifically on themselves for a brief period to warm up quickly. But if the user is talking about heating a space over a long period of time, like a month, no one form of electric heater is going to offer them measurable savings in operating costs over another
Please let me know where the grievous error is in my comments above, rather than just dismissing it as a general failure with no specifics.