But how about using microwaves in a point-of-use (tankless) water heater, could that be effective? Could one just have a single tap and a temperature adjustment knob?
If you had a fan-blower system strong enough to circulate throughout the entire house,
why wouldn’t that work?
It’s more efficient to just use the electricity through a resistive heating element. It’s also cheaper to make a resistive heating element and a resistive heating element is much more reliable in the long term.
It could be done, though.
while radiant heaters might appear in lots of less useful configurations, they can be useful if used correctly.
they heat up objects that the radiation shines on. if you are wearing clothing then it will make the surface of that clothing warm, not real useful if you have layers for insulation. it works well on areas that might have to be left exposed like hands and face, it increases comfort tremendously.
I think such devices do exist. There was a thread on the subject recently, and in that thread it was noted that the heating tubes are very fine and sensitive to calculus if you have hard water. My thinking was that a microwave inline heater might be able to work well with larger, less sensitive pipes.
I read about tests from the early days of microwave research for commercial use, where they tried this on monkeys, and no harm was done. Nobody was saying it’s a good idea, but they were saying that low levels of microwave radiation weren’t harmful. Now that was a long time ago, and I read about it when the cell phone brain cancer panic started, and it turned out not to be a test using broad parameters. I seriously doubt any human wants to be the guinea pig for this.
Sounds great, but you’d have to draw lots to decide who gets to be the meat.
I’m sure it would, but what you describe is not radiant heating.
They worked well during my brief stint in the army, whe we used then to heat up/fry the mystery meat they gave us to eat.
nitrogen, the largest component of air, doesn’t absorb infrared radiation. so making warm air with infrared doesn’t work well.
What ?Oh that may be microwaves at some other frequency. Non-heating frequency.
Heating microwaves are at one particular frequency… that which is best at making water molecules vibrate… microwaves for heating target WATER.
So its really really unsafe to use microwaves for heating.
A room needs a 2000 watt heater, and thats just were the outside temperature is only down to close to freezing, what about Alaska in winter ?
Note your kitchen microwave oven is likely only 1000 watts.
So really heating your body and the room is going to take serious microwave power… its just obvious to anyone that it “burns you, from the inside”.
Worse, you won’t even feel it in your skin straight away, the insides will get hot first… ,you wouldn’t even know it was happening to start with… you only feel the pain after volumes of flesh and bone are cooking…
It’s a bit of a myth that microwaves are tuned to a resonant frequency of water. The reality of it is that water is a highly polar molecule and will vibrate over a wide range of frequencies. Right around 2 to 3 GHz does happen to be one of the better ranges for converting radio waves into heat with water, but you could still make a pretty efficient microwave oven pretty much anywhere between about 1 and 5 GHz. It would be slightly less efficient but would still heat pretty well up to 10 GHz and beyond.
It’s also not just water molecules that vibrate in response to the radio waves. Many fats, sugars, and other molecules also vibrate and generate heat.
So I’m good to go.
Microwaves don’t cook ‘from the inside’ - that’s just a popular misconception.
Why don’t we use microwaves to heat ourselves?
Maybe you have a different model, but mine won’t even turn on if the door is open.
…and a really stupid one, at that. Possibly spread by people who have never actually used a microwave to try to thaw anything.
Always fan out chicken legs with the feets pointing to the center.
Nuff said.
microwaves do penetrate into food and will excite molecules that it hits. microwaves do affect water ice different from liquid water.