Actually it's 100% efficient in terms of converting electricity into heat. Anything that consumes electricity is near 100% efficient at generating heat. If you tried really hard you could build a very efficient laser and send heat outside the room, so not 100% would end up in the room. Even then the majority of heat will be dissipated in the room.
Right, but it was being compared to a space heater, not a heat pump.
Not to mention heat pumps require somewhere to pump to/from, you can't just put one in your basement, plug it into the wall, and heat up the basement. Also heat pumps work best with mild differences, like say 40F inside and 60F inside if you want to heat.
Heat pumps reduce to space heater efficiency if it's sub-zero Fahrenheit outside I believe.
Sub Zero F is seriously cold! But for most climates there is some advantage. 40F is pretty cold. Take somewhere not particularly hot like London - most of the year it will be warmer than that.
Although in the UK most people use gas to heat their homes, because its cheaper. I worked out once that gas and heat pumps cost the same in the end for the amount of energy. Although what I love about heat pumps is how quick they get a place warm compared to radiators.
Granted heat pumps need installation, or you can probably run a tube out the window with one of those adapters.
It's a silly hypothetical discussion, because for the price of this mainframe you could get a heat pump and a set of solar panels and a battery storage, and have some money left over for some Hawaiian shirts to wear once you've heated the place up.
For financial efficiency (environment be damned) a set of crypto miners would be better than either the mainframe or the heat pump.
Is it inefficient? Some of the energy will be converted to light, but all the rest should be converted to heat? If you need constant heating and use electricity for heating, wouldn't a mainframe be as efficient as any other heating?
It would. Unless you could replace the electric heating with a heatpump though - then you would get more heat out of each kW you put in.
But replacing an old-fashioned electric wall heater with a 1700 W mainframe would be totally equivalent. So no, a 1700 W computer isn't more 'inefficient' than a wall heater of the same wattage. The light is neglible and it too ends up as heat anyway.
Heh, exactly. Even the light will quickly be turned into heat once it hits something. Sure some might escape through a window, but that's going to be vanishingly small amount of the total energy.
