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Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
Power consumption depends on the amount of energy you need to draw from the heater; eg. a small flashlight lamp filament glows white hot with a tiny amount of power, as little heat escapes.
What do you want to heat, and how fast must it reach temperature??
As an example, I built a little heating pad to use for evaporating solvent (vapor polishing). That uses seven, 33 Ohm ceramic power resistors (17W rated) in parallel, so around 6.6 Ohms, just under 2A as 12V; around 22 watts.
The resistor are high power for the size and contact area, rather than because they are individually dissipating a lot of power.
They are sandwiched between two 100mm square pieces of aluminium plate, with a piece of silicone rubber "heat resistant" honeycomb style cooking mat at one side, pressing the resistors towards the top plate. I also included a couple of thermistors pressed against the top for temperature feedback.
I just plugged it in for the photo, so it's only been heating up a few second. The temperature controller is from ebay. I've just tried it and it will get up to 100'C, though it takes a few minutes - there is quite a lot of heat capacity in the 5mm aluminium plate.
"Lowest power consumption" means nothing. Doing your project in your Alaska backyard winter is not the same power consumption doing it in your Texas kitchen.
What is the voltage supply ? 12V? Tried a car light bulb? Tried a car cigarette lighter ?
Is it 120VAC ? Tried an incandescent light bulb of the many wattages it works for you ? Tried a wall plug scent heater ?
And remember heat is not temperature.
As noted, all resistive type heaters are 100% efficient.
It makes no difference what type it is if it's resistive.
So when you see those ads for electrical plug-in room heaters and they say they are "efficient", that really means nothing, as that's true of any plug-in heater.
They all convert 100% of their input electrical energy to heat in the room.
Even the energy to power the heater fan (if it has one) is all converted into heat that goes into the air.
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