Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]

rice@lemmy.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  In the world? Me and millions of other people got this info in middle school physics. Sure, maybe we mostly forgot the details by now. But it’s not arcane or ancient knowledge lost to time. It’s in your electricity bill every month. A quick visit to Wikipedia and I got the gist of it back. Every single physicist, engineer, and electrician got this explained again to them.

  source

  • rice@lemmy.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    “a quick visit to wikipedia” is a good example confirming what I said, majority of people are not willing to do that to learn any subject. 0.483% of humans are engineers, of that I’d say there are a small chunk that are near worthless and probably don’t even know these basics.

    source
  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    It’s in your electricity bill every month.

    You get a comparison of electric vs natural gas flow in your energy bill? Wow!!

    I think most people understand W vs kWh, at least on some level. They know things use different amounts of energy depending on what it’s doing (i.e. a microwave sitting idle vs actually warming things), but they may not be comfortable estimating kWh from watts.

    But that’s only the first part of what OP talked about. The meat of the discussion was about energy stored in something like natural gas vs electrical energy. How exactly am I supposed to compare a gas furnace and electric AC vs an electric heat pump? Not only would I need to somehow convert therms (or whatever local unit you use for gas energy) to kWh, but I also need to understand efficiency of heat transfer for heat pumps, which will vary quite a bit based on the weather (much less effective in cold weather).

    That’s complicated, and many HVAC professionals here don’t like heat pumps for whatever reason so they tend to think in terms of resistive heating vs gas heating, which is absolutely wrong.

    source

    • MBM@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You get a comparison of electric vs natural gas flow in your energy bill? Wow!!

      I mean, there are countries where natural gas is billed per kWh. And the OP said

      And kW and kWh are still commony used measurement if you don’t use electricity. Diesel or propane heaters have labels on them on how many watts they can output right next to the fuel consumption per hour and so on.

      source

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        natural gas is billed per kWh

        Really? That’s interesting, since I’ve only seen something like BTU (therms in my area) for heat content or CCF for volume. I know they can be readily converted to kWh w/ a calculator, it just seems odd, especially when everything seems to be advertised in BTU (e.g. furnaces).

        source