Recent content by dario2

But this doesn't account for the extra 540C heat of vaporization that was mentioned here, it only accounts for the difference between 100C in the vapor molecules leaving and the liquid water temperature, divided by how many molecules are still left in liquid form. And I previously thought it...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a space heater is simply a device that uses up electricity, with a mechanism that prevents overheating. For all intents and purposes, all electric devices generate heat equal to the amount of electricity they consume. The advantage of an AC is it can pull heat from...

Yes! That's exactly what I'm thinking of. Why isn't this the most efficient heating device using electricity? I do realize that as relative humidity decreases, water is better able to evaporate from our skin, causing cooling directly and more quickly. Maybe this is why a dehumidifier is a bad...

Yes, and even if not freezing, you still have to recapture that heat before it's lost to evaporation and convection. But if instead both units were inside, you'd capture all of that condensation heat, plus the heat from the electricity spent in running the system.

Is temperature simply the average kinetic energy in a group of molecules? If so, then this potential energy that vapor gains is not kinetic energy, but something else, correct? So the faster molecules being removed simply account for the amount of cooling that the difference between 100C and...

What about an asteroid coming from outer space and entering Earth's gravitational pull, then crashing down? Is its potential energy derived from the energy required to lift it up from Earth? Or maybe from the energy required to lift it up from wherever it came from before reaching Earth? What if...

Thank you! I still don't know anything about this "potential energy" concept, but had been reading about it in one of the gravity threads. As a layman my first impression is that it seems to be a proxy for mechanisms we don't fully understand yet. I also thought that water vapor rises not...

My intuition is that you should add the cold water first, as long as you were sure of how much hot water you had at your disposal. If you added the hot water first, it would cool faster than the other way around, because of entropy and how evaporation works. Hotter things cool down faster than...

If water evaporates, that means it's become vapor, and vapor should be at 100C or more at normal pressure, right? So the molecules that left had to be at 100C to leave. If the average temperature was 35C, each gram of water being evaporated reduces nine other grams' average temperature by 7.22C...

I looked for other related threads and read through them, but I didn't find one where I could add replies, so I made another one. This issue came to my mind as I'm thinking about the benefits and detriments of swamp coolers given a hot climate and moderate to high relative humidity. 1) Some...