Light Sphere, is that the new name to replace light bulb?

It seems we no longer measure electric in kilowatts, it is now measured in homes? 1.4 kW = 1 home.
BBC News Wales said:
49 megawatt capacity means it can produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 35,000 homes
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looking at my own usage last month
1720255347152.png

Yes, I was well under 1.4 kW average, for a 5 bedroom home, but not heating with electric, and my EVs are two e-bikes only. The headline was
"Hydro scheme powering thousands of homes for 60 years" I consider the two power stations I worked on, Sizewell 'B' 1500 MW (2 turbines) and Connah's Quay 2400 MW (4 turbines) and compared with them, 49 MW is not very much.

I look at the power required for my pond pump, which is very low, the most powerful water wheel in UK Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester was 100 horsepower, = 75 kW so water power is not that high, I am sure it can easily be worked out, the limit is governed by rain fall, and catchment area, but I look at lakes like Vyrnwy, which has many roles, main is Liverpool water supply, but it is also used to reduce flooding of the Dee and Seven, however being able to decide if water released to Dee or Seven does not really help, as heavy rain will swell both rivers at the same time.

Someone has to juggle how much water to store, the more stored the less the flood control, the less stored the more likely we will run short of water, add the need to generate electric as well, and likely someone at some point will drop their balls.

Anyway, just looked, and I am getting about a home's worth of electric from my solar panels. Rather a dull day.
 
JohnW2 said:
Well, if"1.4 kW = 1 home", then the two 'units' are effectively interchangeable, aren't they?
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I note the lump in your cheek where your tongue is. I did out of interest look back into winter months, and 20 kWh seems about the most I use in a day, so the two of us use well under the 1.4 kW average. But we heat the house with oil, and really it is not the average when counting by homes, but the peak, hydropower is a good way to store energy, but 49 MW is such a small output, it is not really going to help that much.
 
Well we can do a "Homes Law" calculation if that helps.

I suppose a Horse Power was intended to be a realistic tangible measure but unfortunately got beggared up with a correction thrown in for good measure , was it 50% or something?
 
550 foot pounds per something. Was it hexadecimal? Or something like that, seem to remember 32 poundals in a pound, and 32 pounds in a slug, but when we went metric it went to 980 or something like that, how 980 or 4.2 joules in a calorie is called metric not worked out, or the 3600 joules in a watt/hour.

I thought metric was all 1000s? And not a clue what replaced 2πNT/33000 to work out horsepower from torque.
 
ericmark said:
I thought metric was all 1000s?
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It should be.
However those who introduced "The Metric System" made a mistake of introducing Tens and Hundreds into it - in 1795.
Only 1000 multipliers and devisors have been introduced ever since THAT 1795 mistake was made !!!!

See https://themetricmaven.com/naughtins-laws/
particularly Law Number 4.

See also
(Again !)
As Randy says at 9:25
"Don't ever learn your Metric System from the French. They don't know anything about it."

The Metric System IS Better By A Thousand.
 
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well if we had 10 (or a hundred) hours in a day and 10 days in a week and 100 weeks in a year it would tidy things up yet beggar things up at the same time.
Now if we were able to shift the Earths orbit a bit that might help but our climate would change a bit.
I suppose we have to live with what we`ve got and that includes some of the historical decisions that were made on our behalf.
Makes life more interesting but sometimes more complicated.
 
We are clearly stuck with 365 days in a year, but could easily have 10 months, we could use names to tell us which Sept = 7, Oct = 8. Non = 9 and Dec tor 10 etc. I would have expected 10 radians to equal 360 degrees, but no, or at least one degree to equal one hour. Either 240 units in a circle or 36 hours in the day! So we could move from 86.4 kiloseconds in a day to 1 kilosecond.

The 32 and 980 are set by gravity, clearly we can change the number by changing the value of the second, or length, but one would need to start again from scratch.

A slug is the weight, one pound will give an acceleration of 1 foot per second squared. But it is not a unit used much, the pound is the weight, one poundal will give an acceleration of 1 foot per second squared, not sure if more common, as spell checker does not know what a poundal is but does seem to know how to spell slug.
 
ericmark said:
I thought metric was all 1000s? And not a clue what replaced 2πNT/33000 to work out horsepower from torque.
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The units avail;able for use in the MKS system are, indeed, multiple of 1000 (or 1/1000), working from gthe primary defined unit, Hence,for distance, the primary defined unit is (in the MKS system) the metre, and if one needs bigger or smaller units one should use, for example, micrometre, millimeter, kilometer etc.

As I've said, between when I did my O-Levels and A-Levels (and S-Levels), we changed from CGS system (in which primary defined units were centimetre, gram and second) to MKS (metre, kilogram, second), and that resulted in at least one factor of 100 in the units used (cm vs metre). In fact, to this day, unit multipliers of 10 are also still sometimes seen - decilitre still being used in some contexts.



do, indeed,
 
ericmark said:
I note the lump in your cheek where your tongue is. I did out of interest look back into winter months, and 20 kWh seems about the most I use in a day, so the two of us use well under the 1.4 kW average.
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Yes, but my point was that if one (arbitrarily) defines "1 home" as being equal to 1.4 kW, then the two units become interchangeable (with appropriate conversion), just as the case when we define "1 inch" as being 2.54 cm (or 0.0254 metres).
 
Millimetres, metres and kilometres are all I usually needs (I don`t even have much use for microns these days) so I`m happy about that and yes I still converse equally well in feet and inches and yards as well cos of mee age.
In fact I`m often known to quote a price in shillings and pence once I hear the price in "new" pence, I am rather odd though! I`ll give you that:giggle:

PS - I miss the old ha`penny but the humble farthing had gone when I was young, although you would catch one or two still about back then, had a little robin on them.
PPS - I really liked those old thrupenny bits too, magic to a little boy.
 
There used to be 10 months in the year.

Hence September (Sept, 7), October (Oct eight) November (Novem, 9) and December (Dec,10).

July and August were added later. July named after Julius and August named after Augustus.
 
ebee said:
PS - I miss the old ha`penny but the humble farthing had gone when I was young, although you would catch one or two still about back then, had a little robin on them.
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I thought it was a wren, but I might be wrong.
ebee said:
PPS - I really liked those old thrupenny bits too, magic to a little boy
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I enjoyed looking at a good pair of thrupenny bits as a lad too!

Fnarr, fnarr!
 
ebee said:
Millimetres, metres and kilometres are all I usually needs (I don`t even have much use for microns these days)....
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One obviously could 'manage' with just those..

For most people, kilometres are really only relevant to very large distances (like roads and other travel etc.). However, for a high proportion of 'everyday' purposes (both 'domestically'and in most trades/professions, millimetres are a little on the small side and metres a bit on the large size, so I'd be inclined to suggest that the most 'generally convenient' are, in fact, centimetres (which are in a similar ballpark to inches).

Kind Regards, John
 
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