To be fair, the physics that makes refrigeration work does feel like you’re manipulating primal forces like a wizard
You are literally pumping hot outside.
While utilizing the physics of pressurized coolants that prefer to be gasses around your house.
so, magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And you can reverse the process, pumping heat inside instead, even when it’s freezing outside! Magic, I tell you.
Do not upset Maxwell’s demon when you’re down there sorting the cold atoms from the hot ones!
Did Maxwell contribute to thermodynamics?
It’s hard to believe that there was a point in my life where I could have read that article and understood it for the most part.
Now it might as well be hieroglyphics. Like I can see that symbol is an eye, and that one is a bird, but don’t ask me what that shit means.
I’m with you. My undergraduate degree was in Physics 35 years ago and all I have left is vague impressions of very general concepts. I’m quite certain that I would be unable to do even the simplest derivative or integration at this point.
Thanks. I wonder why I didn’t hear about him in thermodynamics but did in electromagnetics, maybe I forgot.
The early 1900s and late 1890s was where a lot of classical physics and newer quantum theory got their legs under them. After WW2 pretty much most of our current physics knowledge was theorized and it is only now in the last 50 years or so we got about proving a lot of those theories. I believe some of the things got disproven real hard but majority of the predictions and theoretical physics has been solidified. Quantum physics is waaaay waaaaay more complicated now in last 100 years than anything in the previous 500 or even 1000 years ago.
So, if you learn Newtonian physics and classical physics theory, even if you know just the basic linear/non-linear graphs and area under graphs, you can pretty much “guestimate” all the concepts and work the equations. It uses Maths called “Numerical Analysis and Methods”. A lot of physics uses Maths so Maths-knowledge is essential.
Material phase changes are like a cheat code for humanity. Reusable chemical handwarmers are also black magic. You just click a metal plate inside and all of a sudden it’s a hot solid.
NightHawkInLight made a video showing how you can mix two different salts together and it’ll create a packet that stays at 65 degrees for hours.
Who needs magical thinking when you have thermodynamics?
There’s a tank of cold inside. Its the primary export of northern European countries and sustains nearly their entire economies since the only other thing they can “make” is fucking rotten fish. Its important to recycle your AC every 3 years before it runs out of cold by throwing it into the ocean where it can return to be made into glaciers.
Well, because you didn’t add a /s to your comment, some day it will end up as an answer spewed out by some LLM, as absolutely factual.
Let’s hope people won’t get so reliant on LLMs and so uncritical they follow through
I see no downsides
Do LLMs ignore the /s even?
They use sarcasm factually. It’s more entertaining that way.
This anti-swedish sentiment makes you look like a Dane.
That’s impossible. Everyone knows that Danes can’t communicate.
Weirdly this is basically how refrigerators worked before refrigeration was invented.
But instead of throwing out the refrigerator, you’d just add more cold to it.
Turn it around to cool the outside. Global warning solved.
Actually a more efficient electric heater. This is known as an heat pump, aka reverse AC
Heat pump was one of the inventions I thought of in my childhood and was like “oh, it actually works and is good” as an adult.
Of course, the child version was along the lines of “what if we take fridge, put the cold end out and hot end in”, but you see the point.
So did engineers since decades. Just the fact that you get efficiency ratings of more than one in terms of primary energy input to heat energy provided should always have been a massive selling argument. If planned well you can get yearly averages of 400-500% energy output vs energy input.
Seriously, that would have to work better than those giant fans they’re building offshore.
Ooh, I’ve always wondered what those were for. Makes sense.
They actually have a dual purpose, the second being killing seagulls.
I heard they kill whales too.
this video from ‘technology connections’ explains it quite well ^^
I love how mad he gets at single duct in room units too. Rightfully so.
Through the magic of the latent heat of vaporization
i feel technologically connected right now
♫ thermodynamically smooth jazz ♫
Heat pumps really are amazing tech. What if I tell you that this is also how your fridge works. Crazy, right?
They are also one of the few things that are more than 100% energy efficient.
300% to be exact. Because it uses some natural phenomena that just needs a little jump start and then can be maintained with little energy for massive air movement.
That efficiency metric doesn’t really reflect what’s going on. Of course moving stuff around is easier than heating it.
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Some are as high as 510% efficient
The vapor compression cycle isn’t exactly natural, and the compressor still needs a bunch of energy to keep going once it’s started.
Yeah I’m pretty sure my air conditioner uses more electrical energy than all my other appliances combined. Probably by an order of magnitude. No EV in my case of course.
Yup. I’m hoping my AC and furnace die around the same time so I can just replace both with a heat pump. Not sure if it’ll save much on heating prices since both nat gas and electricity are pretty cheap in my area, but it can hopefully make maintenance simpler.
A few years ago I replaced our electric furnace with a heat pump which also gave us AC. Overall the yearly bill went up because we now had AC, but winter months usage is almost half of what it was before. Only matching on the extra cold days where the backup heat kicks in.
Ah… energy doesn’t work that way. You can’t have a perpetually endless cycle with 100% efficiency in real world.
It’s called a CoP, Coefficient of Performance. It essentially is a factor of how much electricity you put in and how much cooling power comes out.
Cooling towers can have a CoP of 12 and beyond, whereas compression cooling usually lingers at around 3 to 3.5. so at a CoP of 3 for instance, you could put in 1 kW of electricity and get 3 kW of cooling power.
Well it’s not creating energy out of thin air. But it is moving it. So you get more energy moved than the amount of energy put in.
Sure but that’s not the definition of efficiency, I’m sure it might be 5x more effective than traditional heaters of some sort from the power consumption perspective
so technically, it’s not generating electricity, it’s moving heat from point A to point B, and believe it or not, 20f air still has a lot more heat energy in it than 0k air. So yeah, it’s more than 100% efficient. Comparing it to electric resistive heating, which is producing the heat directly from electricity, rather than moving it around.
An electric resistive heater is 100% efficient, the efficiency of gas furnaces is measured similarly, though they hit about 90% eff, due to basic mechanics. Geothermal systems would also have greater than 100% efficiency as well, due to the fact that they just move fluid around, which is then cooled by the earth, (or warmed by it) though external heating wouldn’t be.
Why would they remove heat any differently, it’s the same concept cooling a fridge or freezer as a room. Am I too ignorant to understand why this is crazy because I want my mind blown.
How about saying that a normal air con unit, with a few extra valves, can heat as well as cool - in other words, if you’ve got Aircon, you’ve got a full heat pump, just without a pipe to do the heating bit. The energy you’re spending cooling your house could also be heating your water… For free.
Yup, just need to reverse the flow of the coolant. Or just… turn it around (don’t actually do that, use a proper heat pump).
Or it can heat your house during colder months.
Yeah, exactly. If I had funds, I’d be switching to a heat pump.
Shove the hot out the window. *taps head
Literally how it works, too.
Technology Connections has a great video that goes in more detail. Basically an AC is a reverse heater
I disagree completely. Heaters rely on the inefficiency of power transmitting materials, the “heating element”, to turn electricity into heat. The opposite of that would not be an AC, it would be a generator. If you want an actually good simplified explanation of an AC just check out my other comment HERE
the opposite of an AC would be a phase change driven generation plant i suppose. But the opposite of an AC in this semantic case would be a heatpump.
it adds heat to the system to make more cold. duh. global warming solved. stupid enviromentards.
So, if we all turned up the heat also during summer, the climate would cool down! Genius! Just don’t go inside.
No yah dummy. Put the Room in the middle of the Earth and PUMP all the outside heat into the planet core!
BAM! Instant Arctic Weather in the middle of summer !
And BAM! Reverse it for the winter!
BAM! Mild Temps all Year round!
You can thank me later EnvironMentaLists!
The air is hot because it’s moving around a bunch.
The air gets fanned over some coils filled with coolant.
The coolant gets heated and starts moving around a bunch causing it to move through the coil through some insulation foam to the outside half.
Once it nears the end of the loop it has to go through the compressor.
The compressor squishes the moving coolant and now it can’t move around as much, all the heat gets dissipated into the surrounding outside air.
The compressor lets the cooled coolant go back through to the inside.
Process Repeats with diminishing returns.
Wizard_Fucking_Magic
Ok, but here’s a real answer. Have you ever sprayed a can of hair spray or wd-40 and the can got cold? That’s basically the same process.
Install a 12-pack of wd40 in my window, got it!
Turn it upside down, first.
I think whip-its are a much more fun way of teaching that concept.
Oh boy have i got a video you you anon!
It has an entire section at the start explaining how these magic cold boxes work to help with understanding their next evolution heatpump
ofc it’s a technology connection video. Lemmy is the dude’s biggest organized fan club
Based Lemmy users just understand how good it is. I can’t wait for his third half hour video about dishwashers
He has limits, though. I thought his abbreviated dishwasher video would be enough to convince my mother to stop using those stupid pods, but nope.
Technology Conextras I think his other channel where he posts even longer form content. Fun for all the family.
Wait until he finds out about refrigerators.
Well I love AC Momma! And she loves me too! And she makes my titties real perky!
ICP frequenting 4chan?
Maxwell’s demon lives in there.
It’s like a mini-Gandalf telling all those Balrog-shaped hot molecules “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”.
The demon lets the fast ones out and the slow ones in.
