A Guide to Checking How Much Heat Does a 250 Watt Heat Lamp Produce
Wondering how much heat output your heat lamp can provide? Check our guide to help you check the total output of your 250-watt lamp.
06/08/2019
The Law of Conservation of Energy, which is one of the basic laws of physics, indicates it’s not possible to create nor destroy energy. However, it can be transferred or converted from a single form to another.
That said, if you turn on a 50-watt light bulb, 50 watts of electricity gets converted into 50 watts of both heat and light. The same applies to a 100-watt lamp, and so on. However, there are certain types of lamps which are far more efficient in terms of producing light, or heat in this matter. On top of LED Flame bulbs and Flicker Flame Light Bulbs, Heat lamps are a good example.
How Different Are Heat Lamps?
A heat lamp is basically a more powerful incandescent lamp which is primarily used to produce heat. Even though the standard incandescent lamp has been widely used back then, more and more consumers are starting to prefer more efficient options.
Heat lamps, which are used in a variety of applications, use infrared heat which is invisible to the naked eye. Click here for more information on the best smoker thermometer.
After all, incandescent bulbs generally convert the energy used into heat instead of electricity. However, since heat lamps are designed for this purpose, it’s actually seen as an advantage.
While incandescent bulbs produce higher heat output than light, they’re far more inefficient in terms of heat output as opposed to heat lamps.
Compared to standard incandescent lamps which have 100 watts or lower, heat lamps are often available at 250 watts, even more. Due to this difference, it’s far more efficient at producing heat, and this allows us to determine how much of a heat lamp’s 250 watts of power gets converted into heat.
How Much Heat is Produced by a 250-Watt Heat Lamp?
Now, let’s move on to the main topic at hand: how much heat does a 250 watt heat lamp produce?
As mentioned earlier, the amount of wattage a lamp used as energy gets converted into both light and heat. As such, the amount of heat produced by a 250-watt heat lamp will actually depend on its efficiency.
Let’s take a look at a few examples:
An incandescent lamp, which is fairly inefficient lighting, only has around 2% efficiency. This means that a 50-watt incandescent lamp produces only one watt of light and 49 watts of heat.
Meanwhile, a halogen lamp is a bit more efficient as it provides you with 7 watts of lighting and 43 watts of heat for a 50-watt lamp.
These are just some of the examples. The main factors that will help you determine how much heat your heat lamp will produce will depend on its efficiency and wattage. Therefore, if the heat lamp you purchase has 250 watts with a 10% lighting efficiency, it means that the amount of heat it produces is at 225 watts.
Heat lamps are widely used in raising chicks due to the ample amount of heat they provide.
While this answered your question on how much heat does a 250 watt heat lamp produce, it can be a different thing when we’re talking about how hot the basking spot underneath the lamp will get, regardless of the wattage.
This is due to how a heat lamp is designed. Apart from that, it also has something to do with how the heat and light are either emitted in all directions or concentrated in a single area. Therefore, while you can use a lamp’s wattage as a guide to determine its heat output, you should also consider checking the temperatures of the basking area instead of just relying on lamp wattage alone.
Check out other articles from KRM Light+ for more info on LED lights and the like!