interesting
I thought the Idea of the original dyson fan was to make it give more airflow - this will just be sucking through cold air cooling the air that has been heated... or am I missing something?
Dyson unveiled another household appliance with a space-age twist this week, tweaking its range of Air Multipliers to include a heating element. The Dyson Hot has a similar look and feel to the company's other blowers, but warms rooms instead, with a target temperature you can set from the display on its base. It includes the …
HP Cynic wrote : "overpriced, aspirational tat from Dyson: they are like the British Apple ... but with appliances"
Indeed. I never understood why a transparent dirt box appealed to people. I thought the point of a vacuum cleaner was to remove dirt from sight.
I am old enough to remember early-ish vac cleaners when my mother first got one - a Hoover Junior. No disposable paper bag then, just a cloth bag that when full you tipped into the dustbin and fitted back on again. Then when disposable paper inner bags came along it was like the best thing since sliced bread.
Then this genius Dyson comes along and "un-invents" the disposable paper inner bag. Brilliant.
My wife used to work for a company that supplied materials to Dyson's factories and she has dealt with him personally on the phone. Forget about his public charm, he is a POS. I would never buy anything from him.
Dust mask icon.
Dyson are great innovators and inventors but they're let down by poor engineering and manufacturing design. Various examples spring to mind that can be summed up as plasticky tat.
And the hand-driers are deafeningly loud and high pitched. Goodness knows how noisy these heaters would be.
If you had to work next one of those hand driers you would have to wear ear defenders, yet the public can be exposed them to them, including children, who's ears are much closer to the noise source, willy nilly. I look forward to the first class action suing the makers for progressive loss of hearing.
Just watch how people trying to dry their hands wince at the noise and then walk off with wet hands. No wonder they are cheap to run.
It doesn't matter how inefficient the motor is - this thing is designed to turn electrical energy into heat, and whether it's the motor or the heating element doing it, the same amount of heat will be produced for the same power consumption. If it were just a fan, the efficiency would be of interest.
So it's basically £270 for a fan heater. Many outrageous claims have been made about the "efficiency" of electric heaters, although apparently not in this case. Fan, convection, radiant, halogen, "ceramic" or overpriced Dyson, they all cost the same to run for a given heating capacity. The only way you can cheat is by using a storage heater, which is no more efficient but takes advantage of cheaper electricity.
True from a thermodynamic point of view, but not from an application point of view.
You use a fan heater where you want to provide directed heat, say to warm cold feet in a drafty room. In that application the heating effect on the device itself which is subsequently radiated out is wasted because it isn't being delivered where you actually want it. Perceived warmth is what matters, not total heat output of the device.
Oh and there is a method of electrical heating that is more efficient than any of those that you list - use of an electrically powered heat pump - i.e. an air-conditioner unit in heating mode.
so it's impossible to make an inefficient electric heater? There's no way one can be any more or less efficient for a given amount of electrical power where heaters are concerned? And there's no way to increase the distribution of any heat produced?
Or are you just trying to say that the inneficiency of the motor is trivial in this case?
No - what he is saying is that inefficiency is irrelevant because it achieves the same result as efficiency.
If the motor was 100% inefficient (i.e. the power was on but couldn't turn the fan - blades too heavy, something jammed in the system) the power being used still has to go somewhere - and it all goes to creating heat - which is the point of the whole thing anyway.
Course a 100% inefficient motor would probably result in a lot more heat than you were really looking for (not to mention lots of big red engines and men in wellies).
If I stick a 2KW electric bar heater in the corner then that corner and anything in view of the heater will heat up and, eventually, convection will make the rest of the room warmer.
If I stick a fan heater in the corner it'll mix the warm and cold air and, generally, the whole room should warm up at the same rate.
So, if I stick a bar heater in the corner I'll heat one corner to 30C and the temp may go down to 15C in the opposite corner. If I'm sitting in that corner it'll still be cold.
If I use a fan heater it'll make most of the room about 20C at about the same time, so will save energy.
So, any fan heater whose motor is inefficient to the point of heating may not mix the air sufficiently and may, therefore, be providing local heat and not enough mixing. Though I admit in practice the efficiency doesn't matter all that much.
I've used their hand driers in some motorway rest rooms, and they're brilliant... so much more efficient than the old style hand driers.
If these work on a similar principal I can imagine they'd be quite effective... but those rest room ones are rather on the noisy side... quieter than the old hand driers, but still noisier than I'd want in my home.
I do like their vacuum cleaners though.
they collect filthy water in the tray under where your hands go and then dribble it down the side of the unit onto the floor (or, hilariously, onto the power socket that feeds the thing if you happen to work here I do).
Then the groove round the yellow fancy trim at the top starts to fill up with mankyness. I do not lke them.
If you have ever bought a Dyson product, you too will have watched it being rendered useless in no time as that all-important clip / cleat / attachment manifold disintegrates before your very eyes. Inventive that lot sure are, but sure as hell can't do product design.
I always thought it very generous of Dyson to leave a gap in the market for others to build a better-built Dyson.
I had one of the original Dyson vacuum cleaners, and although I managed not to break it, it was a clunky monster whose bagless claim was ironic given that you had to change the filters about as often as you'd have to change bags on a conventional machine.
I have to say, though, that the modern ones are a great deal better. I have a DC24 now, and it appears to be much better engineered. Everything is solid and clicks together beatifully. And the filters are not only superior (HEPA) but washable. But as I didn't manage to snap the original one, I suppose this might be just as snappable...
Sir James Dyson: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Sir James Dyson: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Sir James Dyson: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Sir James Dyson: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
Really?
You might want to take a look at a climate control system. 0.85 kW in = 2+ kW of heat out. They use heat pumps—no heating elements as such—and heat a room by running their air-con feature in reverse.
Very popular in Italy, which imports over 70% of *all* its energy supplies, including gas, vehicle fuels, and the supplies needed to run their power stations.
This is also why don't see many office buildings fitted with gas-fired central heating these days.
I'm sitting next to my 40 year old Phillips 2000W fan heater. There's a label underneath that says this:
"Every six months, disconnect from mains, remove bottom panel, remove fluff, oil the bearings."
It still works perfectly.
No tamper-proof screws, no chuck it away mentality in those days!
I also have a Dyson DC01 that I found in the dump about four years ago. Great for dog hair removal.
Nice looking heater but at a guess the motor must have to go a serious speed to make the air flow through the slot with any impetus. I don't think the bearings will last as long as my Phillips has.
That I saw Dyson-type "fans" on sale a few days ago. Probably Chinese made rip-offs of his patents/designs, but still far to expensive, to my mind, at 4,000 rupees --- over fifty quid. I don't know how much the originals go for now.
This is just blowing, of course, but there's not much call for room heating at this end of India, where mid-winter equates to a very decent English summer day.
<--- That's me putting the purse away again, having heard the price.