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How efficient is an electric heater?

My guess: greater than 95%. Possibly even 99%. I say this because most energy is converted into heat; some is converted into light and kinetic energy, and possibly other forms of energy.

Anyone other opinions? (This is not homework. I am just curious and I'm having a discussion with a friend who says an electric heater is horribly inefficient, less than 5%.)

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    $\begingroup$ Most of the light and kinetic energy are still absorbed by the walls, so they're still heating the room. A radiant heater heats the room primarily through light anyway, just infrared light. $\endgroup$
    – endolith
    Commented Dec 2, 2010 at 16:13
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    $\begingroup$ You have to take the production of electrical energy in the power plant into account. I think the efficiency of a typical power plant is not larger than 50%. You also have losses for the energy transport. So your heating will not be very efficient. You also pay for the energy production and transport. Maybe, it would be even more efficient to transport the oil to your home and burn there directly. I do not know that... $\endgroup$
    – Tobias
    Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 17:10
  • $\begingroup$ @Tobias The thermal efficiency of a power plant is a different kind of "efficiency" from what Thomas is asking about. Thomas appears to be asking, how much of the electric power delivered to the heater is transformed into heat. Thermal efficiency compares the amount of power that the plant obtains from a given flow of heat as compared to the amount of power that a Carnot engine could obtain from the same flow. $\endgroup$
    – Solomon Slow
    Commented Jul 20, 2015 at 13:56
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    $\begingroup$ @endolith people who live in glass houses should not use electric heaters, I guess. $\endgroup$
    – user169874
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 19:55
  • $\begingroup$ Ask your friend what they think the 95% of "lost" energy becomes... $\endgroup$
    – pete
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 23:10

7 Answers 7

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It depends on what you mean by efficiency.

Suppose you want to heat your house. An electric heater like you're considering would do this by converting electrical energy directly into heat. Pretty much all the electrical energy does get converted to heat, as you suggest. The energy used to get a certain amount of heat into the house is simply equal to that amount of heat. In that sense, the electric heater is 100% efficient, since energy not directly turned into heat will be turned into heat soon. That isn't a very useful way of thinking about efficiency, though, because any form of energy in your house will probably decay into heat energy pretty quickly. Your computer, television, and refrigerator are 100% efficient at heating your house from this point of view, because although they do things other than generate heat, the energy they use to do those things becomes heat in short order.

By contrast, a heat pump would heat your house by taking heat from the outside and moving it inside. The energy it needs to do this depends on the outside and inside temperatures. If the temperatures inside and outside are $T_i$ and $T_o$, an ideal heat pump (i.e. a Carnot engine) would require

$(1-\frac{T_o}{T_i})*dH$

Joules of work energy to move $dH$ Joules of heat energy from outside to inside (if the outside temperature were greater, this number is negative, meaning the heat pump can extract energy).

The efficiency of the electric heater, compared to the idealized heat pump, is

$1-\frac{T_o}{T_i}$

for given inside and outside temperatures. When the inside and outside temperatures are the same, the electric heater is zero percent efficient. If it's 0C outside and 25C inside, the electric heater is about 8% efficient.

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    $\begingroup$ @Thomas I don't get what you're driving at. The kinetic energy created by an electric heater is heat - heat is the random motion of molecules. Any light created will soon become heat when it is absorbed. The 8% efficiency meant this: We want to add heat to the house. We consider two ways of doing it. One is to take heat from outside and put it in the house. To put 1 Joule of heat in the house, we will need to do .08 Joules of work. Another method is to convert electrical energy into heat. To add 1J of heat to the house with this method, we will need to use 1J of electrical energy. $\endgroup$
    – Mark Eichenlaub
    Commented Nov 30, 2010 at 23:58
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    $\begingroup$ @Thomas No, as Mark wrote, 100% of electric energy going into the heater turns into heat; light is not emitted outside, air circulation turns into heat by friction. The real question is how efficient is the whole system, with a power plant on the other side. $\endgroup$
    – user68
    Commented Dec 1, 2010 at 0:02
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    $\begingroup$ @nibot: Heat pumps aren't very common because: A. real heat pumps are a far cry from Carnot heat engine ideals (my guess would be less than half that efficient). B. real heat pumps are extremely complicated devices (they are essentially air conditioners running in reverse). C. real heat pumps perform poorly when the temperature differential is large, and D. real heat pumps are extremely expensive (due to B) $\endgroup$
    – Billy ONeal
    Commented Dec 1, 2010 at 7:36
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    $\begingroup$ @nibot, Bill: In Germany, resistive heating is almost non-existant in new houses. Electricity is way to expensive for that. Heat pumps are used regularily, but not as often as e.g. gas. $\endgroup$
    – Jens
    Commented Dec 1, 2010 at 12:56
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    $\begingroup$ For the interested, here is a nice little pedagogical paper about this result, and other consequences of replacing heaters with heat pumps: bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/AJP00180.pdf $\endgroup$
    – N. Virgo
    Commented Jan 18, 2013 at 7:21
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The efficiency is 100%, which is considered a poor heating efficiency. It is 100% because all light, motion, etc produced by the heater at some point becomes dissipated to heat.

Same heating efficiency have all other completely-in-door devices: heating with a TV set is as efficient as an electric heater.

However, there is a better way to heat. A typical air conditioner can heat your house by 3 joules consuming only one joule of electric energy, making it more than 300% efficient. This is done by actually cooling the outside world.

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    $\begingroup$ We don't say "more than 300% efficient" in such cases. (If that were truly the case then we could run a 33% efficient heat engine from the heat pump's output and use that to power the heat pump....) We say it has a coefficient of performance of 3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance $\endgroup$
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 22:03
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    $\begingroup$ @RickBrant My undergraduate thermal physics textbook did actually describe the efficiency of a refrigerator as 300%. $\endgroup$
    – gerrit
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 18:58
  • $\begingroup$ Sorry but your textbook is using the wrong term (or you're misremembering). That is describing COP, Coefficient of Performance. $\endgroup$
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 22:32
  • $\begingroup$ So heat pump is more efficient than regular heating? How is it possible $\endgroup$
    – pete
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 23:13
  • $\begingroup$ So how efficient is passive heating in a greenhouse? $\endgroup$
    – Cees Timmerman
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 10:53
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It was a good answer Mark. Of course by drawing a lot of current some Joule heating will happen outside the house as well, in the transmission lines and transformers especially. So the efficiency will get lower depending upon where you draw the (electrical box). Some of the energy from the TV and refrigerator will also escape from the house before being degraded to heat (harmonics in the electric lines, noise, and light from the picture tube (I'd bet these loses are well under one percent)).

In any case air sourced heat pumps are far less efficient than the theoretical limit. The figure I've seen is that a quality heat pump might give you about 3.5 times as much heat as the electrical power input. Not bad compared to the alternatives, but a very long way from Carnot efficiency. Using real (im)perfect working materials is really a drag.

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  • $\begingroup$ I suppose the pertinent comparison is between e.g. burning fuel in a power plant, to make steam, to make electricity, which is then transmitted to a home, and then used to produce heat via a resistive heater, versus simply burning the fuel in your own home furnace. $\endgroup$
    – nibot
    Commented Dec 1, 2010 at 0:17
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    $\begingroup$ I used to attend college on a campus with a large coal-fired steam and electric plant - steam was piped directly to buildings (underground) to heat them in winter. The campus also had a large "chilled water" plant, which I assume was circulated to assist with air conditioning needs. So, if you control a lot of buildings, you can make efficiencies. $\endgroup$
    – user169874
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 20:02
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Are you also interested in cost effectiveness and not just efficiency of the device?

Heating with natural gas can be more financially efficient because it costs less per energy unit for natural gas delivered to your property/location than it costs per energy unit of electricity in some reasons making natural gas fueled heating more "efficient" than electric heating in terms of $ cost to heat a building while this may have nothing to do with actual efficiency of the device converting the energy to heat. In the same way a heat pump under the right environmental conditions can be very effective while in other applications waste oil furnaces (ie if you have lots of used motor available for low cost) can be relatively efficient in terms if energy conversion and cost effectiveness without having the theoretical efficiencies of a heat pump

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I've wondered this question myself. Efficiency is calculated as: output/input X 100 & yields a percentile answer. For example in an electric power supply, it is easy to measure the input & output power, then calculate a corresponding efficiency. I believe this is what the original writer is looking for. However, the problem with the electric heater is that the input is measured in WATTS (ie, about 1200 or 1500 Watts for a typical electric space heater), but heat output is measured in BTUs. According to Wikipedia, 1 BTU = 0.293071 W·h, or conversely, 1 W·h is about 3.4 BTUs. Given that, a 1500 Watt heater operated for 1 hour should produce about 5120 BTUs. So.... here's the rub; Does anyone publish or know the actual BTU output of any electric heater? I haven't seen that number, and since the efficiency calculation requires the same units of measure for both input & output, I don't think the question will be answered until someone measures & publishes the BTU output. But..... All that said, I feel the heater is 100% efficient because the ultimate goal is to put energy into a space, and with an electric heater, all the energy that is delivered to the heater is delivered as energy into the space.....regardless of how we measure it. That's 100%.

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  • $\begingroup$ If it makes noise, then some of that energy is going to sound which likely won't heat the room. $\endgroup$
    – Kyle Kanos
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 0:52
  • $\begingroup$ This seems more like a question than an answer. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:02
  • $\begingroup$ Noise will heat a room if it doesn't escape it, but it takes over a year of screaming to heat your coffee. Good thing the Sun is really loud. $\endgroup$
    – Cees Timmerman
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 11:00
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In as much as "waste" energy in any system is generally converted to heat, directly or indirectly, heating systems are all close to 100% efficient in converting their direct fuel into heat. [The exception is a heat pump as Mark covered fully, which exceeds 100%.]

The main issue with efficiency and electric heating is that using electricity as the fuel may be an inefficient use of the original power source.

It is therefore inefficient as a use of the gas or what have you that was originally the source of the electricity.

Typically a power station might have an efficient of say 34%, although can be over 50%, in converting the fuel energy into electricity.

See eg: Wikipedia on combined power

Some of that is less lost in tranmission, but this is a small factor relative to the energy lost during generation.

Gas heating will however convert 100% of the fuel energy into heat directly in the home.

It is in this sense that electrical heating is not efficient, even though the electrical heater as a device is efficient.

It follows that electrical heating uses up more fossil fuel and generates more greenhouse gases than gas heating.

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  • $\begingroup$ Except practically gas heating requires refreshing more air, leading to heat loss. $\endgroup$
    – Cees Timmerman
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 11:03
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The correct answer is the difference between how many BTU's supplied to the electric heating device and the output in BTU's then the percentage can be calculated.The formulas above are for heat loads which are not only effected by indoor and outdoor temperature difference alone.You also need to take into consideration the effects the two have on resistive values of the insulation product used.If you can answer the first sentence I would be interested in the answers and values of various forms of electric heat.

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