Comment on 5 tomatoes
foo@feddit.uk 5 days agoWhilst this answer is correct, it’s not entirely accurate, because it is dismissive of the root cause. The logical follow-up question is: “Why is energy billed in kWh?”. If the question/cycle answer continues down this line there will probably be an answer like “because <some person> had to make a decision once, and they chose this because of <some reason>, and now we’re all stuck with it because of convention.”
Anyone who doesn’t understand what joules are probably doesn’t understand what kWh are either. If the billing convention (and every other power consumption label) used joules (of course MJ or GJ) instead, then most people would just accept that as the unit of billing and measurement, and those who understand what the units mean would have an easier time of it.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.
It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.
If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 3 days ago
Lot’s of people are confused by watts and watt-hours tho. I think having the power rating of appliences as a rate (J/s) is more intuitive. If I use a 5MJ/s fan for 10s I used 50MJ of energy. The only inconvenience here comes from our weird time conversions, so I think J/h would be more convenient