• Godort@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    To be fair, the physics that makes refrigeration work does feel like you’re manipulating primal forces like a wizard

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            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.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              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.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            5 months ago

            Thanks. I wonder why I didn’t hear about him in thermodynamics but did in electromagnetics, maybe I forgot.

            • maniii@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              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.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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.

      Video in question

  • GluWu@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    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.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • Tryptaminev@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          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.

  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    Heat pumps really are amazing tech. What if I tell you that this is also how your fridge works. Crazy, right?

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        That efficiency metric doesn’t really reflect what’s going on. Of course moving stuff around is easier than heating it.

      • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        The vapor compression cycle isn’t exactly natural, and the compressor still needs a bunch of energy to keep going once it’s started.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          5 months ago

          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.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • WhatTrees@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          5 months ago

          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.

      • And009@reddthat.com
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        5 months ago

        Ah… energy doesn’t work that way. You can’t have a perpetually endless cycle with 100% efficiency in real world.

        • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          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.

        • ShrimpCurler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • And009@reddthat.com
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            5 months ago

            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

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          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.

    • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • LazerFX@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          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

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 months ago

            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.

      • maniii@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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!

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    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

  • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

      • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Based Lemmy users just understand how good it is. I can’t wait for his third half hour video about dishwashers

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • maniii@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Technology Conextras I think his other channel where he posts even longer form content. Fun for all the family.