Space Heater - Vehicle Addon

[Xelanthol]

Basically as the title says, it’d be nice to get a space heater that can run off of battery power, for those that like to set up engine stuff in our base.

[Burnt_Earth]

IRL space heaters absolutely devour electricity and regular 12v vehicle electric systems cannot accommodate them at all, you’ll blow fuzes and melt stuff and oh-god-it’s-on-fire type stuff. They pull alot of amps and it’s too much.

That said, catas’ in the future, your evac shelter is chilly, there should be a heater even if it drains the heck out of your batteries, so I support this motion.

Vehicle tiles are ‘climate controlled’ if I understand correctly. If you have some bit of your solar farm inside, you could make a little enclosure with roof tiles, boards and whatnot, it should be tolerable. I’ve never tested this theory, but sleeping in wrecked cars is cozy compared to being outside, maybe being inside a vehicle, inside a house would be really nice?

[Barhandar]

[quote=“Burnt Earth, post:2, topic:8865”]IRL space heaters absolutely devour electricity and regular 12v vehicle electric systems cannot accommodate them at all, you’ll blow fuzes and melt stuff and oh-god-it’s-on-fire type stuff. They pull alot of amps and it’s too much.

That said, catas’ in the future, your evac shelter is chilly, there should be a heater even if it drains the heck out of your batteries, so I support this motion.

Vehicle tiles are ‘climate controlled’ if I understand correctly. If you have some bit of your solar farm inside, you could make a little enclosure with roof tiles, boards and whatnot, it should be tolerable. I’ve never tested this theory, but sleeping in wrecked cars is cozy compared to being outside, maybe being inside a vehicle, inside a house would be really nice?[/quote]
Depends on space heaters, vehicles do have heaters built in, for example. Probably not running on batteries, though.

Also there’s a big difference in power consumption between makeshift heater out of heating coil and heat-resistant material and a commercial reflective heater.

[Malkeus]

Car heaters use engine coolant piped into the interior and run through what is essentially a radiator with a fan blowing over it to bring heat inside the car. We…don’t have radiators. or engine heat for that matter.

[jcd]

Also there’s a big difference in power consumption between makeshift heater out of heating coil and heat-resistant material and a commercial reflective heater.

Efficiency is not that different between electric heaters. All generate the heat via electricity at 1:1 efficiency, so there is not much difference, so long as the heat is generated inside the space we want to heat up.

That been said, this kind of heater is dead simple to craft, and easy enought to scavenge, so there could be at least one type of this power-hungry device.

Also survivors could use scavenged heat pumps for heating, with efficiencies around 1:4 (electricity-to-heat), or fossil fuel heaters (diesel/kerosene)

[iceball3]

Perhaps make charcoal kilns and such generate heat too if they didn’t? Could come in handy.

[Midaychi]

Yeah I’ll make a suggestion, especially with that radiant temperature pr on the github, it would be technically possible to make a vehicle module that radiated heat from battery power. That said, a number of things that don’t radiate heat currently could be used instead, like furnaces and even the charcoal kiln.

Ontop of that, technically there are two suggestions I can make for you to abuse current existing mechanics to survive cold;

1: have a bed, or a bedroll, with at least a blanket and a pillow on it. Even if your character is wide awake you can try sleeping on it to spend some time, and you’ll automatically and gradually stabilize to comfortable every time you try sleeping. Your character is basically bundling up in blankets and taking a snooze and you have time to warm up.

2: Being inside the IN part of a vehicle counts towards stabilizing your temperature, towards comfortable. You may have to experiment with what counts but you might be able to build some sort of crafting cockpit you can hide in and benefit from the temperature stabilization. I think it only works if the engine is on; and you’re not exposed to the outside ie the exits are closed or boarded. A foot crank with alternators on it counts as an engine, I’m pretty sure, but only as long as your hands are on the wheel and you’re attempting to go forward with cruise control (though if you strap enough alternators and weight on it, the negative power will basically prevent the frame from moving at all no matter what speed you set the cruise control at)

[GunnerX]

Efficiency is not that different between electric heaters. All generate the heat via electricity at 1:1 efficiency, so there is not much difference, so long as the heat is generated inside the space we want to heat up.

Show me a 1:1 efficiency anywhere and I will kiss your Nobel prize.

[jcd]

lol.

we are not talking about converting electricity into motion.
we convert it into heat here.

Thus we have 1:1 ratio, meaning that every kWh of electricity we use becomes a kWh of heat.
This is quite easy to do.

Usually the problem is that for every energy conversion you lose a % into heat. This is a problem, if you don’t want heat, but this is not the case here.

Of course the opposite, converting heat to electricity is impossible to do at 1:1

I won’t even bother to bring a reference on this. Check it out.

PS. Also check out boilers with 105% efficiency. They exist. Check condensing boiler, eg. http://www.acv.com/int-en/24_02/2/app.rvb

[GunnerX]

[quote=“jcd, post:9, topic:8865”]lol.

we are not talking about converting electricity into motion.
we convert it into heat here.

Thus we have 1:1 ratio, meaning that every kWh of electricity we use becomes a kWh of heat.
This is quite easy to do.

Usually the problem is that for every energy conversion you lose a % into heat. This is a problem, if you don’t want heat, but this is not the case here.

Of course the opposite, converting heat to electricity is impossible to do at 1:1

I won’t even bother to bring a reference on this. Check it out.

PS. Also check out boilers with 105% efficiency. They exist. Check condensing boiler.[/quote]
No. It doesn’t work. 100% efficiency is impossible otherwise the electricity wouldn’t pass through the resistor anyway. Because physics.

Your 105% efficiency boilers assumes, and aggregates upon, 70% energy use for heating and 30% energy use maintenance. In other words they assume that 70% on energy use will occur during your showers, dish-washing, laundry etc… This may be accurate with regards to old boilers, but they still don’t achieve an actually caloric energy efficiency of 105%. They also seem (based on an admittedly small sample set of 2) to be universally gas powered and thus not electric.

So yeah electricity -> heat at 100% also not possible since you A: wouldn’t have a circuit, and B: would require a perfect vacuum with all radiation energy reaching the desired focal point, which in turn would require a perfectly reflective surface. A perfectly reflective surface being about as likely as a perfectly frictionless one.

[jcd]

About electricity, not at all. bring references on electricity-to-heat if you please. It IS 100%. All of it becomes heat.
How heat is transferred to the space we want to heat is another thing with its own efficiency, irrelevant to the conversion efficiency.

Also on boilers… its 105 because of how we count. (e.g. GCV vs NCV of the fuel).
Again, we are talking about efficiency of conversion from fossil fuel to heat, not about the transport system for the hot water.

[Burnt_Earth]

Yeah, electric resistance heaters are one of the few things that are basically 100% efficient. You get some energy converted to light, some goes to making that buzzing sound, maybe, but otherwise, it’s all comes out as heat. The universe really likes generating waste heat.

[Valpo]

i guess one could build such a heater buuut.

Considering that it is much easier for a survivor to aquire wood and burning it in a stove for heat then to accumulating the non trivial amounts of electricity that are required to heat even a single room I question the need.

Implement anyway cause we can? Well if a dev has to much time xD.

I d rather have a way to convert heat into energy --> ergo building a steam powered generator would be cool.

[i2amroy]

Yeah, electric resistance heaters are one of the few things that are basically 100% efficient. You get some energy converted to light, some goes to making that buzzing sound, maybe, but otherwise, it’s all comes out as heat. The universe really likes generating waste heat.

Psh, well refrigerator minimum efficiency is 100%! They go up from there!

(It’s because refrigerator efficiency is measures in the heat it moves. The absolute worst refrigerator doesn’t move any heat, and is functionally the exact same as an electric heater attached to the back of the fridge. :P)

That said this will probably go in eventually, but at the same time it’s pretty likely that we’ll chop out automatic climate control from most vehicles and require you to get a heater/AC part for them to work.