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Comment by devilbunny | Hacker News Reader

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.

Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

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Warmth from the inside out, to be honest I'm a little scared

I would not connect it to Alexa.

I read about how they tried this in the 60s.

They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such.

So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.

Not the same effect exactly but I live in an 70s era apartment with heated ceilings in a couple rooms (which I didn’t even know was a thing).

It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.

I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.

Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.

Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.

This was probably 70s-80s. House heated to 10-15 C/50-60 F and microwave for comfort beyond that.

"It is well established that high-power microwave radiation can induce cataracts via its thermal effects"

But the previous comment said “low power”?

The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.

It was not an article in an engineering journal, so no mention of power.

The “human heater” was literally a mock idea for a competition in the sitcom Silicon Valley. The jury canned it. https://youtu.be/Di3fPj0pUbQ

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