Actual heating systems can be better than 100% efficient, while crypto mining or cinebench or whatever is <100%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Principle_of_operati...
In terms of heating systems though, it’s normal for fuel based systems to be <100% because you need to vent exhaust, and a lot of your heat your fuel produced can be rejected away from where you want it with that. For example, older gas boilers might only be 80% efficient or so, and even the much more efficient condensing boilers are still only in the low 90s.
A pure resistive heater is also less than 100% efficient, but it's very very close.
But by this construction, are all systems which take energy as input (and do not convert it to another form for storage) de facto 100% efficient?
When we talk about a (very old) furnace being 75% efficient at turning the chemical energy of a fossil fuel into heat energy, is the 25% loss purely combustion byproducts with some inherent chemical energy plus some non-combusted fuel?
So for a resistive electric heater, you're dissipating all of the energy as heat (minor quibbles about electromagnetic radiation or status LEDs aside). The same is true for your computer.
Burning hydrocarbons have two main sources of energy loss: incomplete combustion, and energy carried away by exhaust gases. Obviously furnace design influences both of these - the US federal minimum is 78%, but high-end furnaces with all the tricks can get over 90% per https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers
Heat pumps are the third major category, and they are more than 100% efficient because they are using their energy to steal a larger amount of thermal energy from the outdoors air and move it to inside your home (and much of the electric energy they consume is eventually discharged as heat inside your home as well).
But this is really just conservation of energy or the first law of thermodynamics, and those predate Planck.
The majority does go to heat but you'll never hit the 100% threshold like other methods of heating can meet (or exceed)
They kinda work like a reverse refrigerator. A fridge takes heat out from the inside and moves it to the outside. A heat pump does the opposite.
> Actual heating systems can be better than 100% efficient, while crypto mining or cinebench or whatever is <100%.
The intricacies of why a crypto minor is less than 100% efficient when working as a heater are easily deduced, unless you’re precisely the sort of midwit that likes to leave replies such as the one you left.