Well, yes and no. Yes, if the kids leave the lights on in the winter, that energy is going to heat the house. However, lights tend to create little hot spots often near ceilings. Your furnace does a much better job of heating the air that you live in. If the lights are placed in moving air that gets distributed evenly to the house, they are just another electric heater. So, nothing gets lost in the conversions because what we normally think of as conversion losses isn't really lost. It ends up as heat. If we are trying to charge a battery or move a boat through the water, that is a bad thing. If we want heat, it is a good thing.
Pat
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "Reid" <axius@...> wrote:
>
> Pat,
> I am intrigued. Are you saying that we have been wrong all these years trying to get the kids to turn out the lights? When the house is heated by electricity, it will cost the same whether you leave all the incandescent lights on or not? Of coarse some of the light escapes through the windows, so this is a loss. And there is no loss of conversion from heat to light and back to heat? Interesting.
> Thanks,
>
> --- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "greenpjs04" <forums@> wrote:
> >
> > Just a comment about light bulbs... Incandescent bulbs (ie, not florescent, CFL, LED, etc) are a pure resistive load. In other words, they are not indictive or capacitive. Therefore they make pretty good heaters for enclosed spaces. A 100 watt bulb, will supply 100 watts of heat to an enclosed space. Some of that (more than you might guess) is directly produced as heat while the rest of comes away from the bulb as light. That light, however, then gets absorbed by "stuff" in the space and gets converted to heat.
> >
> > I would still recommend buying parts designed to be used as heaters such as the one you recommended because light bulbs can easily get broken and they burn out, but light bulbs do work as heaters.
> >
> > Pat
> >
> >
> > --- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "Reid" <axius@> wrote:
> > >
> > > Jim,
> > > That is the perfect part for the job. Most people don't seem to >realize that you want a pure resistive load to generate heat, not a >light bulb.
> >
>
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