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a good book if any of you are interested in sustainable energy (although it was written in 2008, so some bits might be out of date by now) 172.70.85.33 (talk) 14:33, 15 January 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)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)