Talk:3038: Uncanceled Units

DUDE I'M STILL IN SCHOOL RN, WHAT? (also, the joke is that energy is power*time, so kWh is kJ/s... in an hour Caliban (talk) 13:27, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I guess not every comic can be a winner. Talking about an appliance using a certain amount of kWH per day is clear and normal. Power gets billed by the kWh, not the Joule. While technically not wrong, wanting "cancel" a sub-part of the commonly-used energy unit kWh and leaving it in deliberately-obscured units most people are less familiar with is the sort of insanity I'd more expect from White Hat than Cueball. 172.70.35.171 13:39, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Maybe that is a meta-joke? To frame kWh/day as something crazy by giving that line to whitehat --Lupo (talk) 13:52, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

There's a difference between instantaneous power draw, and the total "volume"(/area, really) of power over time. Though a fridge is "always on", it is still only irregularly at full-draw. But, to the power company (or to the gas company, who will generally give a kWh measure of 'energy taken from the network'), they don't (generally) care whether you used twice as many kW over half the time or half as many over twice the time, within any given total billing period, even if it affects what you think. 172.70.163.46 14:39, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Using joule as if it was an everyday unit of energy would be weird but I don't agree that watt is crazy. It's a normal unit of energy consumption that does mean something to people, e.g. 1000W microwave, 100W (incandescent) light bulb. Don't get me wrong kWh/day is also useful to translate it to your energy bill, but I do feel slightly uncomfortable every time I see that time divided by time :-) Mtcv (talk) 14:40, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

This is especially funny with US units. My car needs about 5l/100km, or 0.05mm². Now I am wondering how many ft^(-2) my car does... --Lupo (talk) 13:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

fridge 172.70.126.147 14:22, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

The late Sir David MacKay wrote an excellent book, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (which is available free online). On this page he talks about the units he uses in the book: kWh for energy ("one unit") and kWh/day for power - becuase it's simple for lay-people to understand - how many units does this appliance use per day. It's a good book if any of you are interested in sustainable energy (although it was written in 2008, so some bits might be out of date by now) 172.70.85.33 (talk) 14:33, 15 January 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

If anyone's curious, I found an online gallons per square foot calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/construction/gallons-per-square-foot 172.71.223.6 15:54, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

The answer to Cueball's question is likely NO in the US and YES in the UK, due not just to gallon size but also fridge size (a model like that is a particularly large fridge, when I bought one 10 years ago going for the smallest available I had to modify my cabinet above the fridge as there wasn't one less than 6'8"- the fridge hole was 6' previous).Seebert (talk) 16:02, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I disagree with this comic, and I think the final paragraph in the explanation about Hubble's constant best explains why. Beanie ^talk 15:57, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Technically, kWh should be written as kW⋅h or kW h, because it literally means "kilowatts multiplied by one hour", not "kilowatts per hour" as many people assume. However, almost nobody writes it correctly. (kW/h is sometimes also seen, but egregiously incorrect.) Also, particularly now that electric vehicles are becoming more popular, people often get confused between kW and kW h. The car can charge at a peak or average rate expressed in kW, but energy billed by a charging service provider is expressed in kWh. People frequently either add or remove the "h" incorrectly because they don't understand the difference. In some places like India, a kilowatt-hour is simply referred to as a "unit" to avoid confusion. In my opinion, it was an enormous mistake to use kWh when we could be using mJ instead, which I think is probably something close to the point Randall may have been trying to make. Anyway, I wasn't sure if there was a place for any of this random trivia in the article itself, but feel free to use it. Equites (talk) 17:11, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Relevant XKCD… I mean relevant YouTube video: "Cursed units" 1 and 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkfIXUjkYqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg7xe8MkJHs Fabian42 (talk) 17:31, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Highly relevant, in fact. The first video referred to the kilowatt-hour as "cursed", which became a highly polarizing issue in the comments, something that was addressed at the beginning of part 2. Assuming these responses weren't cherry-picked, I get the impression that there are a lot of people on both sides of this. It seems like the same kind of thing we're seeing in this very comment section. ISaveXKCDpapers (talk) 18:10, 15 January 2025 (UTC)