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.
Oh yeah I've seen that used before, makes me cringe every time.
Anyway, do must people not go to high school? Or is stuff like that not part of the physics curriculum in some places?
In my highschool physics was optional. You had multiple options for science credits and could get through without taking it.
Oh, in my country you have to take physics, chemistry and biology. That actually goes for middle school too. Plus geography which actually also contains geology. And math could be considered science I guess.
We have elective courses too, but all the basics are mandatory. That includes at least two foreign languages, history, our own language, literature (becomes separate subject from language in high school), music, art (including history of both), basic computer usage, shop class for boys and home ec for girls (with trades in between so us boys still got to cook and stuff, plus in elementary school everyone gets to knit and crochet IIRC). Oh and physical education unless you're disabled, in which case you either get to watch or just do something else I think.
I'm actually sure I've missed something. These are all mandatory. You can do shit like folkdance or choir for electives, or many other things depending on school. I had philosophy as one of my electives lol
I think people in some countries (the US) don't even know what they're missing out on tbh.
I never took chemistry, and I didn't take a real physics course until college, though we had survey courses like "physical science" throughout school.
I don't recall if we talked about watt hours specifically, but joules were certainly mentioned, though I doubt most people remember it. Most of the emphasis was on things like friction equations (given an ideal pulley and an incline with slope...), not real world things like understanding your electricity bill.
That said, I think most people intuitively understand the difference between instantaneous consumption and total consumption over a time period. They know playing games will drain their phone or laptop battery way faster than browsing the web, for example. They just tend to not stop and think about it and they simplify things in the wrong way (power rating on device), though a total energy estimate does work (e.g. when comparing refrigerators).