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Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

2-3kWh seemed impossibly low to me, so I checked, and yup, that’s amazing.

A phone battery at 5V and 2500mAh (probably about the average) is approximately 12.5Wh of energy storage. Even if you used the entire battery every day, we’re talking 4kW per year, costing ~60¢ in the US.

Your phone battery could only power a standard 60W incandescent lightbulb for 12 minutes, but powers your phone for hours. That’s amazing!

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Incandescent light bulbs should really be understood as space heaters that happen to emit light.

At the end of the day all electronics are just space heaters with interesting side effects. It's getting cold and I'm using my GPU to heat my living space, it just happens to emit computation as well. Gotta keep gaming to capture the excess value!

The new solution to every problem on our planet: GAMING!

RTX 3090 SLI to the rescue

I did this several years back in university. Bitcoin mining wasn’t really profitable on my GPU, BUT it made enough to pay for its own electricity. I considered crypto to be a wash, but the real profit came from free heat.

At the end of the day, all work* is just the production of heat with interesting side effects. Entropy is a cruel mistress.

*in the physics sense

Maybe add some mass for inertia with a cast iron case so that it’ll continue to heat even after being turned off.

I remember there was an attempt to get around the EU ban of incandescent bulbs by selling them as space heaters that conveniently happened fit into lamp sockets.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180326040930/http://heatball.d...

> standard 60W incandescent lightbulb

Which is why nobody uses incandescent bulbs anymore.

You can get the same amount of light for 1/5 of that power with LEDs, i.e. your phone could power that amount of light for an hour.

Still doesn’t seem like very long!

No more EZBake ovens or Toy popcorn makers that use inky bulbs.

>EZBake ovens

Yeah, 'kids these days' just get nichrome wire instead of a good old light bulb. :)

There was an article I read a while back (can't find it at the moment) that involved someone modifying a 'modern' EZ-Bake oven to be powered off a USB-C PD charger. The future we live in!

It's from Reclaimer Labs: https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake...

It's not hard to find houses with incandescent bulbs in the USA.

As a reference datapoint, my Model 3 Dual Motor will go about 16 miles on 4kWh of electricity under real-world conditions. Certainly some serious energy to push a 4,000 lb. + passengers vehicle that far, but compared to a year of use of a smartphone, it's a drop in the bucket. At my 7¢/kWh, that costs a whopping $0.28/year.

Add there losses on battery charging and downconversion from grid, night time charge keeping, and you can easily get 40-50% more, so 2-3kWh is really optimistic, aim at 6-7kWh, and that's on wired charger.

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