This Heating Tech Breaks the Laws of Physics

are massive home heating bills keeping you up at night [Music] there's got to be a better way well today is your lucky day what if i told you that there is a heating technology 500 more efficient than what you've got in your house today now if you're one of those people who are thinking doesn't that break the laws of thermodynamics don't you worry about the unwavering laws of thermodynamics let me worry about blank ah the heat pump hardly knew the technology goes back decades so are heat pumps all they're cracked up to be and what about the crazy claim of being 500 efficient well i thought that deserved a deeper dive here on tupa davinci [Music] to answer this question we need to break this down to a few categories starting with the laws of thermodynamics and what efficiency really means thermodynamics is a study of energy how it's transferred and by extension the relationship between all forms of energy the three laws of thermodynamics are as follows the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases entropy can best be understood as randomness you can clean your house and tidy up this is a state of low entropy and nature much prefers randomness just wait a few days and suddenly it's as if little messy gnomes have gone and made a mess of things the third law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero we'll just brush over this one and we're not going to talk about it a whole lot in this video at its core when you put up walls in a roof your end game is to make a conditioned space that has a temperature difference to its surroundings in the dead of winter it might be freezing out but you want to maintain 70 degrees inside remember there is no such thing as cold only the absence of heat doesn't master oogway and kung fu panda say that somewhere i don't think so ricky pretty sure it does inversely in the summer you strive for something close to seven degrees inside even while it's 100 degrees outside well the minute you go and make this your goal you're kind of messing with entropy in thermodynamics heat flows from regions of high concentration to regions of low so your warm house in a winter day is slowly losing heat to the outside you can try to slow this down with insulation but try as you might your home is still going to lose heat to the outside well that's no good i mean being comfortable is like the highest ideal of human life well that and cat videos on youtube and food photos on instagram sorry the gram this is a resistive heater it takes electricity and converts it into heat energy because remember the first rule of thermodynamics is that you can't create energy only converted a resistive heater like this one is actually really efficient like over 90 percent if you took one apart you notice that metal coils glow and emit light a form of energy that isn't providing heat and thus not 100 efficient really in our world there is no such thing as 100 efficiency a gas car is between 25 and 40 efficient this means that each gallon of gas you burn over 60 percent of it is wasted as heat and sound and stuff that isn't moving you forward move over to an electric vehicle and that efficiency is improved greatly to over 80 to 90 percent so if a space heater is like 90 efficient how the heck can a heat pump be 500 efficient that literally breaks the first rule of thermodynamics right so a heat pump does produce about five times as much heat with the same amount of electrical energy as a resistive space heater how does it do this well that's where your decision to watch this video is rewarded with a conversation about the refrigeration cycle yay science come on this is gonna be good so two common heat pump systems you have in your house right now is your air conditioning system and your refrigerator remember when i said that there's no such thing as cold only the absence of heat so what the heck is your air conditioning doing well it is not converting energy at all it's doing something far more sinister okay i don't know why i said that that's not sinister it's simply moving heat from one place to another so bad news anyone whose answer to climate change was to run the ac all day with the windows and doors open that's not gonna work because the ac is just taking heat energy from inside your house and pumping it outside in the refrigeration cycle there are a few things we need to have first you need a working fluid something that has some advantageous properties we use refrigerant since 1990 something like the hydrofluorocarbon r134a a fluid whose boiling point can be manipulated stick a thermometer in a pot of boiling water and you'll see something interesting the temperature rises until the water reaches its boiling point at sea level that's 100 degrees centigrade or 212 fahrenheit after that the water stops heating up that's because all the energy provided by your stove is no longer heating up the liquid but it is helping to break the bonds and turn it into a gas this is known as the latent heat of vaporization this is very energy intensive and that's why it might be hours until the water entirely boils off only then will the steam be able to continue to get hotter what's interesting is if you put that same pot in a vacuum meaning you sucked out all the air pressure that pot would actually begin to boil at room temperature does that mean water in a vacuum gets really hot not at all it means that the boiling point of a liquid is actually a function of its pressure just imagine all those air molecules in the atmosphere kind of pushing down on the water the minute you remove it it suddenly becomes far easier for the water to evaporate and turn into a gas the opposite is actually how a pressure cooker works by trapping the evaporating steam and not letting it out the pressure inside the cooker increases dramatically over one atmosphere the pressure we would normally see by doing so the boiling point of water is maybe 110 degrees or 120 degrees and that extra temperature means your food cooks faster so the boiling point of a fluid is actually a function of pressure okay so now that we know that what if we change the pressure of our refrigerant to really high pressure and really low pressure to take advantage of this welcome to the refrigeration cycle so now we're going to need a compressor that big loud thing you hear whenever your fridge and ac kicks on the compressor compresses the refrigerant to a much higher pressure temperature and comes out as a vapor we could then run this hot compressed fluid through a heat exchanger which is basically a mechanical system designed to maximize surface area of heat transfer via convection the transfer of heat from solid to air think of like a heat sink on your computer case or anytime you ever see fins like on a radiator on a car those are all heat exchangers built to have maximum airflow to take out the heat from the system if we use metals with really good heat transfer properties like aluminum or copper then the heat from the fluid passes through a long series of coils with fins on it which heat up the metal heatsink and then a fan blowing air over these fins will be blowing hot air into the space there are two parts the condenser and the evaporator remembering that making a fluid evaporate requires energy input the evaporator is a side that blows out cool air that's because the low pressure largely liquid fluid comes in and because of its low pressure it readily boils absorbing lots of energy thus cooling that area the condenser is where the fluid comes in a high pressure high heat vapor and as heat is extracted by the heat exchanger the vapor begins to condense and inversely puts out large amounts of heat to turn into a liquid so the compressor increases pressure and this metering device also able to work in both directions acts as an expansion valve greatly reducing the pressure of the fluid so by manipulating the pressure of the refrigerant we can have the fluid condensed to a liquid or evaporate to a gas to either absorb heat and then release heat pretty cool right so if you have a split ac system your evaporator is on the inside blowing cool air and the condenser is on the outside discharging hot air so heat pump is basically just your ac system except now it can be reversed evaporator can become condenser and the condenser can become the evaporator with the switching valve the refrigerant from the compressor can be routed in both directions allowing it to heat or cool your house so while many people in europe and asia have these combo ac and heat pump systems they're not quite so popular yet here in the u.s why is that they're 500 percent efficient after all okay so about that that's not exactly true to be more specific the efficiency of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature difference between the two spaces for the ideal 500 percent number the temperature difference has to be less than 70 degrees fahrenheit or 25 degrees centigrade so that gets you to your first problem how can you suck out heat from outside to pump it inside when it's really cold outside well if it's freezing out it's zero degrees centigrade or 32 degrees fahrenheit but on the absolute temperature scale kelvin that's actually 273.15 degrees kelvin meaning that the point where there is no heat energy at all is negative 273 degrees centigrade so yeah even if it was negative 40 degrees out there is still heat energy that can be extracted just note that the efficiency drops the colder it gets so we have to introduce new terms now the coefficient of performance we can't say the heat pump is 500 efficient because that pesky law of thermodynamics you know it's not possible instead we could say the heat pump can have a potential coefficient of performance of five or five hundred percent this means that if i use one kilowatt hour of electricity i can bring five kilowatt hours of heat energy into my room from the outside remember heat pumps do not make heat only move it and that my dear watson is why a heat pump does have a cop of five while not breaking the laws of thermodynamics fun fact did you know that taking two seconds to hit that like button can actually save you fifty percent off on your home heating bills no what no now it's not all unicorns and rainbows the coefficient of performance is going to drop the colder it gets a heat pump is a no-brainer here in san diego because the coldest it ever gets here is above freezing but if you live in a very harsh climate there are some things you need to know first of all the coils on the outside unit get really cold and will eventually start to form ice the formation of ice is bad for two reasons first the ice acts as an insulator reducing the heat transfer from the metal fins to the air lowering performance also as the ice thickens it lowers the flow of air between the fins until eventually it's totally frozen over and no air can pass over the fins when this happens most systems enter a thaw out mode where the heating to the home stops and instead it flips the system around and blows hot air over the outside system to thaw out the ice so you will not be getting heat during this time and you'll be using electricity while not getting any benefit so in a really cold condition you might be getting closer to one or two times the performance not the five you would have gotten but still good depending on where you live and the system that you have some heat pump systems have a resistive heating system that will trigger on when it is in thawing mode this way you continue to receive heat just at a more expensive rate until once the outside unit is thawed out then it turns back into being a heat pump there is one more optimization we can make and that is moving to a geothermal heat pump geothermal sounds complicated it just means geo earth and thermal heat so even if it was negative 20 degrees outside it turns out that if you dig a few feet into the ground the temperature is usually pretty constant based on where you live 45 degrees fahrenheit to 75 degrees fahrenheit and the ground is such a massive heat reservoir that if you put your heating or cooling cools underground a few feet you could greatly improve the performance of your system in very cold temperatures but just remember even in subfreezing temperatures heat pumps can totally still work heat pumps are better than resistive heating but what about like a natural gas furnace this is where things get interesting and we start to see why heat pumps aren't more popular here in the u.s so a natural gas furnace is also pretty efficient around 70 percent not as good as the electric heater because some of the gas invariably will be exhausted unburnt or partially burnt but at this point we need to bring up one more variable the cost natural gas is typically built in therms here in the us which is a unit that stands for 100 000 btu or british thermal units so 100 cubic feet of natural gas has about 100 000 btus of energy or one therm it's complicated but just bear with me average prices per therm range between 50 cents to a dollar but if you convert one therm into kilowatt hours you'll see that one therm is the equivalent of about 29.3 kilowatt hours of electricity so looking at a state like idaho where natural gas is dirt cheap you can see that converting natural gas to kilowatt hours means that it's about five times as cheap as electricity is per kilowatt hour and this is the crux of why most homes in the us that have gas hookups use gas furnaces to heat it's just so cheap and even though the heat pump is more efficient it might still be cheaper to operate something like a gas furnace now there are some changes on the horizon for instance lots of new home construction is opting not to run a natural gas line because it does add a lot of cost to construction if you remember what happened in texas in february during a tragically cold winter large parts of the state were left without electricity so you might think it wise to also have natural gas as a backup option and i think i agree with you on that but if you don't have electricity even with natural gas you can't power the blowers to move the air and actually provide heat to your home if you have a natural gas or wood burning fireplace you might be able to bring in some warmth but there are a lot of moving parts here and maybe if you guys leave me a comment i can cover some more of the trends and where things are headed in a future video so let's recap a heat pump doesn't actually generate heat a resistive electric heater or a natural gas furnace does it converts electrical energy in the case of the resistive heater into heat energy or chemical energy in the form of natural gas into heat in the case of the gas furnace unlike these two types of systems a heat pump does not create heat it only pumps heat from one place to another and it is this reason that makes it able to move up to five times more heat energy per kilowatt hour than other types so it's not 500 efficient but it does have a coefficient of performance of five heat pumps are making big inroads in home heating even in the us and even in high efficiency vehicles like electric cars in fact new tesla models have ditched the resistive heating they used to have opting instead for heat pumps so let's have a round of applause for the heat pump truly one of mankind's greatest achievements because without it there's no phoenix arizona or las vegas we couldn't keep our food cold for weeks and our sodas and beer would be warm oh that's a depressing thought so thank you heat pumps for all you do alright so that is the look at heat pumps and why they are seriously really quite efficient in terms of heating up spaces and why they don't actually break any laws of thermodynamics big shout out to all of you guys for watching this video all the way through especially to all of our patrons on patreon and all of our youtube members you guys the support is what makes this show possible and keeps us independent so if you want to see more videos like this maybe even allow me to do this full time one day consider joining us on patreon or as a youtube channel member so take a look around we have some other really cool videos recently we talked about why the starship from spacex is so big we have a bunch of other stuff that i think you'll like as well so take a look around the channel and until next time i'm ricky and this is tuba davinci

Channel: Two Bit da Vinci

Views: 669,490

Rating: 4.8225522 out of 5

Keywords: heat pumps, efficient heating systems for houses, efficient heater for small room, efficient heating, efficient heater for garage, home heating systems, home heater, home heat pump system, home heating systems explained, this heater tech breaks the laws of physics, how heat pumps work, how are heat pumps so efficient, heat pump efficiency, heat pump efficiency vs natural gas, heat pump efficiency ratings, heat pump effectiveness, heat pump efficiency at low temperatures

Id: moQapzjjmQM

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021