How many grams of fire to make 88000 calories?
To heat from 40F to 200F with 10 pounds of milk is 1600 degreelbs and we can heat 16000 degreebls with 10 buffaloxen of firewood, so, conveniently, we know this process takes one clean buffalox of firewood. Pretty trivial in imperial* units.
I agree of course with the use of metric (even if it’s fun to take the piss), but you’ve arrived at an equivalently meaningless result in either case. Now if you want to use a calculator and go from calories to kWh, it’s a different story.
runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I agree that metric is superior in almost every way, but I’m here for pedantry. 1 calorie is the amount of heat it takes to heat 1 gram of WATER 1 degree Celsius. Raw milk is slightly more dense than water so it would take a few extra calories. Cheerio.
Bgugi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be further pedantic, milk also has a different specific heat which would overcorrect for the density difference by about the same amount.
The calorie is not an SI unit, it’s a cgs unit, and it isn’t coherent or order-of-ten with SI units.
Furthermore, I’m not aware of any market where you can buy energy in calories. Most will be in terms of Wh, mass, or volume, none of which would be coherent or order-of-ten with calories.
Except for food, I guess. But how much utility is there in knowing that you could almost pasteurize a liter of milk with a fun size snickers?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes that is absolutely true, and since it’s milk there will be a few percent variance it requires slightly less. But still very good to get the ballpark easy, to check a more accurate calculation isn’t way off because some typo or something.
Easy calculation between heat, energy, weight and volume is so cool, and actually quite often practical to make quick estimates.