He once made several videos and went on a rant on how a $15 tiny 1500watt space heater will heat up a room just as well as a more expensive 1500watt one that is way, way, way bigger. He also asked why people buy cold air intakes for cars since they already take in cold air. Surface area and volume of air are foreign concepts to him.
Well, he is right, the room will reach the same temperature, if the heating power is the same (it is, 1500W) and the thermal losses of the room are the same (there's no mention of the room properties changing).
Cold air intakes might make some sense for cars that don't already have them from the factory, but most cars I've seen already have a factory cold air intake. And the way most people install aftermarket air intakes is just stupid and even in some cases harmful to the engine (K&N filters which are very shitty filters that let a lot of fine dust through which will score the cylinder walls and destroy the engine over time, paper or woven plastic filters are the best, highest efficiency dust filters, and guess what, the OEM already uses them)
No but resistive heaters are 100% efficient. So 1500 watts in, 1500 watts of heat must just pour right out of it! Why do heatsinks have fins again?
Yes, 1500W in is 1500W out. Unless it's being converted into something other than heat, like light, sound, electricity, or mechanical motion.
Heatsinks have fins to lower the thermal resistance to air. A heatsink that has more surface area will have a lower temperature difference between the heatsink and air than a heatsink with less fins, which will have a higher temperature difference.
The thermal resistance is called Rth (resistance thermal), usually measured in K/W (kelvins per watt) and the temperature difference dT (delta t) in kelvin. A heatsink with 1 K/W heated by 1W will reach equilibrium at 1K above ambient temperature. A heatsink with 10K/W will reach a dT of 10K with the same 1W. The same power will be disippated in both cases.
In extreme cases you might turn your heatsink into a red hot glowing lump of metal, but that won't mean that the emitted power will be any higher than if it isn't glowing. The emitted power will always be equal to the transferred power,
in steady state, where thermal mass has no effect.
I can honestly say that my nice large quartz heater from Sam's does a much better job at heating up this room than the $15 Sunbeam from walmart that's just a screaming fan shoving air over hot coils that I've had forever. Both do 1500/750.
I'm sorry but you're wrong. 1500W electrical input is 1500W heat output in both cases. The difference is how the heat is emitted. In the case of a fan/convective heater, the heating element heats the air via conduction, the fan blows the hot air out. Little or no heat is radiated. A quartz heater or an old-fashioned radiator is primarily a radiant emitter, it radiates heat in the IR light spectrum. An oil-filled radiator also has quite a bit of thermal mass, it stores some energy in the weight of the oil.
The reason you feel such a large difference in convective versus radiant heating is a phenomena called "stratification". Air's density decreases with increasing temperature, so hot air is more buoyant than cold air. The hot air that's being blown out of a radiant heater will thus float up to the ceiling of a room and stay there until it cools down sufficiently to fall down again, or until the entire room is filled up with hot air, from the ceiling down. This is why it takes a long time for it to heat up where you usually need it the most, at the floor. This can be partially mitigated by a ceiling fan that mixes the air around in the room, but then you have more heat losses through the wall.
Radiant heating, in contrast, acts like a ray of light. It shines from the heat radiator directly onto all surrounding objects and surfaces that are in line of sight, even straight down. So you will feel it a lot more directly, but only on the side of your body that is directly facing the radiator, the other side that's in the shadow will be cold. Radiant heaters will eventually heat up the air too, but indirectly, through heating up surfaces which will then heat up the air.