So, Alec over the Technology Connections channel made an hour long video explaining the difference with kW and kWh (obviously with other stuff around it).
I'm living in northern Europe in an old house, with pretty much only electric appliances for everything. We do have a wood stove and oven, but absolute majority of our energy consumption is electricity. Roughly 24 000 kWh per year.
And, while eveything he brings up makes absolute sense, it seems like a moot point. In here absolutely everyone knows this stuff and it's all just common knowledge. Today we went into sauna and just turned a knob to fire up the 6,5kW heaters inside the stove and doing that also triggered a contactor to disengage some of the floor heating so that the thing doesn't overload the circuit. And the old house we live in pulls 3-4kW from the grid during the winter just to keep inside nice and warm. And that's with heat pumps, we have a mini-split units both on the house and in the garage. And I also have 9kW pure electric construction heater around to provide excess heat in case the cheap minisiplit in garage freezes up and needs more heat to thaw the outside unit.
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. So I'm just wondering if this is really any new information for anyone.
I assume here's a lot of people from the US and other countries with gas grid (which we don't really have around here), is it really so that your Joe Average can't tell the difference between 1kWh of heat produced by gas compared to electricity? I get that pricing for different power sources may differ, but it's still watt-hours coming out of the grid. Optimizing their usage may obviously be worth the effort, but it's got nothing to do with power consumption.
So, please help me understand the situation a bit more in depth.
If you think the average person understands watts, you live in a bubble, straight and simple. You have a very skewed notion of the average person.
Yep that video is leagues beyond most peoples capabilities to understand. Thinking they already knew and understood it is crazy.
Nah, the video is pretty straightforward, but it's presented in a way that most people would lose interest unless they're actually into the subject matter. I see three problems with the video:
Power vs energy is fairly simple with a good explanation. Power is simply the speed at which energy gets used up. For example:
That's extremely intuitive. All a regular person needs to know is that simple concept, plus a way to measure it (the Kill-a-watt example). Boom, 5-10 min video.
But the talking head made it way more complicated by starting with gas. That's just belabouring the point that you can increase or decrease power, which is already intuitive with batteries or things we can see (wood) or feel (tiredness).
They could then segue into gas, once the power vs energy issue is established. A can of butane is like a battery, and the valve (e.g. screen brightness, game vs texting) controls how quickly it's used. We can compare gas and electricity directly because electricity can be turned directly into heat, just like gas can.
And then you segue into heat pumps. Basically explain how your AC/fridge works (i.e. moves heat instead of creating "cold"). Make a demo where you move heat vs create heat and show how much energy is used. As in, heat a room from 72F or whatever to 90F, one using a heat pump and the other using a space heater. Show how temps compare on both sides of the heat pump vs space heater (other rooms shouldn't change w/ space heater). Then use that to show a real-world example of a house that swapped from furnace to heat pump to really drive the point home that moving heat is more efficient than creating it.
This is way beyond majority of peoples capabilities. Everything in your post and his video is, both are long too. Majority of people just do not care, otherwise we'd all be engineers.
The part about electricity is pretty short, just a few bullet points and a couple paragraphs. If it was video form, I could cover it in 2-3 min complete with visuals.
I don't know why this video is so long.
All his videos are like that, he enjoys being long winded
Explaining to people learning to cook that oil is liquid pan that carries heat is just too mind blowing. The simple shit is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy beyond the average smartwatch wearing doof
We live in a world where people demanded (and succeeded) in having the Meteorological Service of Canada to report windchill as "feels like C" instead of, ya know, a measure of actual heat loss in Watts / M^2 / s
You say that like it’s a bad thing? I prefer not to dust off my slide rule everytime I want to know how cold it is out.
The first time they did the feels like scale... My father's colleagues were involved. They took a sample of people and put them in wind tunnels and sprayed them with water and said hey how's it going over there.
I wish more than anything I was joking right now.
Yeah, just give me actual temp and wind speed, and I'll get a feel for what's cold by going outside.
Idk, I kind of like knowing how many layers of clothes I need to put on before I leave the house. Especially when the wind chill can make it feel like another -10°C pretty easily.
Same. I just look at the temp and wind speed and make an educated guess, erring on the side of more layers.