Comments by "Tx240" (@Texas240) on "Technology Connections"
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He did address it. Having a fan isn't related to efficiency or heat output at all. If you take 1500 watts out of the wall, you are putting 1500 watts into the room. Period.
As for the idea that a fan will more efficiently heat a room because it's spreading the heat out faster, so it's going to run less and use less energy, it comes back to the 1500w in, 1500w out thing.
The fan may be "more efficient" at "spreading out the heated air" but this idea acts on our brains like an optical illusion. It's not more efficient at "heating the room" because we're limited to the fact that 1500 w of heat is 1500w of heat.
Also, you don't NEED a fan. Convection will occur regardless of whether there's a fan or not. The warmer air will spread itself out.
If want to heat the space faster, which is probably what most people think of as "more efficient", you'd need more heaters.
That would get around the problem of heating "efficiency" being limited to the watt rating of one heater.
Efficiency is near 100% in all these 1500w heaters. So, again it's a marketing and mental illusion thing to even use this term to compare different heaters of the same wattage.
Having a fan may help spread the heated air out faster. BUT, if the 1500 watts worth of heated air is spread out faster, your just thinning out the 1500w watts faster. Which means you'll need to run that unit the same amount of time as a natural convection unit that's spreading heat out slower.
Why? Because your still just spreading 1500w.
If you dump 1 bucket of water (turn on 1 space heater) in your living room, it will spread out x deep across the entire floor. If you were to use a broom and sweep the water outwards from where you dumped it, you get all of the floor wet faster, but still with 1 bucket worth of water. If you want to stand in deeper water (a warmer room), you need to dump another bucket. Now you have 2x water (heat) seeping throughout the entire floor (room your heating).
It's an odd example, but we've all seen water spread out. So you can visualize it, as opposed to air which is, hopefully, harder to see.
If the fan spreads air faster, that's you sweeping water away from the bucket. The entire floor gets a little wet faster. But, if you want deeper water on the floor or more heat in the room you need another bucket of water or you need to let the heater run longer.
Why? Again, because the heater with the fan is pulling 1500w from the wall, that's all it's putting into the room. The "spreads out faster" is a mind trick that I hopefully explained above.
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