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.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    In our case,

    Yeah, we had all that stuff too. This was many years ago, but I remember the electricity section being fairly basic, as in mostly covering how volts and amps interact (i.e. high voltage, low amps is way worse than low voltage, high amps, in terms of safety). And that’s really about it. Maybe we covered other stuff, but it really wasn’t important to go further, probably because I went to school before EVs and whatnot were commonplace.

    I think my education was quite good. I was very much prepare for the university I went to, but that kind of meant we skipped some important stuff. For example:

    the economics course in high school included our tax system

    We didn’t really learn economics or taxes in high school. I mean, we discussed basic supply and demand, but that was more in the context of history than anything actually applicable to life (i.e. Great Depression’s impacts on supply and demand). I learned the vast majority of what I know about economics, investing, and taxes on my own because I’m interested in it. It just didn’t seem to make the cut for high school, where we learned a wide variety of other stuff, like biology, math, history, English, etc. A basic high school day was broken up into 6 periods, usually consisting of:

    1. math - start w/ geometry and end at pre-calc or calculus (depending on which track you took)
    2. history - US, European, world, etc
    3. english - literature, writing, etc
    4. foreign language - needed 2 years; select between Spanish, German, Japanese, or French (maybe one or two more); the other two years were electives IIRC (but more restrictive than the next group)
    5. electives - PE, shop, etc; there were several options, no guarantees as to what people took
    6. science - biology, chemistry, physics, etc

    I did two years at the high school and two years at the local community college so I could get a 2-year college degree at the same time as my high school diploma. That was pretty rad, but I wonder if maybe I got super compressed education since I had about half the class time as my peers (about 3 hours/day vs 6), but we had more reading at home, which I think made up for it (I’d spend 3-4 hours/day studying vs 1-2 hours from regular high school).

    However, at the end of it, there were some gaps:

    • didn’t know how taxes worked - pretty easy to learn later, but I did need to teach myself (I think we had a PF elective option)
    • didn’t know how economics worked - basically anything at the government policy level was a black box - we covered basic supply and demand, but not how the fed creates money, tariffs, etc, outside of some brief mentions in US history
    • very basic overview of how consumables like electricity and natural gas work - i.e. what a watt hour is, or how to compare electricity and gas; school mostly stuck to principles and theory, not practical things like understanding your gas bill

    I don’t think that was a failure per se, it just wasn’t deemed important since the whole point of high school was to prepare you for college, and anything that didn’t help with that seemed to get dropped. I think this is unfortunate, and that high school should have you ready to make a decent wage outside of school (i.e. finish w/ marketable skills, like the German system does).

    Absolutely mandatory (like 60% of total course load), school specialty curriculum (like 20-30% of total) and then the rest was up to you to choose what you wanted to learn.

    Yeah, we were pretty similar, except we didn’t have “school school specialty curriculum” since I went to public school, and public schools are standardized in what they teach. So we had something like 70-80% as mandatory curriculum, which prepares you for college, and 20-30% electives, which hopefully prepare you for life. I did shop (make stuff out of wood), home ec (cooking), drawing (nearly failed, I suck at art), and visual communications (graphic design, photography, etc survey course).

    • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I actually also went before EVs were commonplace, I was more referring to the fact that you got the knowledge to instinctively make that connection (and probably nowadays they have exercises on the subject too).

      Yeah, we were pretty similar, except we didn’t have “school school specialty curriculum” since I went to public school, and public schools are standardized in what they teach

      I went as, I believe, the second or third year of an experimental new system under which schools offered different specialty tracks that were up to the schools themselves to design. We had like a science-focused track, an art focused one, and then one that was basically “cool shit we threw together” that included stuff like psychology and law (first all kinds of basic legal concepts, which in of itself was a really big course, and then a second course focusing mostly on Estonian contract law, as that is hugely important, as well as some looks into stuff like employment law, consumer protection law, etc. This probably was not too common in schools in our country either, we just had a really awesome principal that was a former lawyer and took it upon herself to teach all this.

      As of the 2024/2025 school year, the system is abolished and now the student gets to pick more of the electives, instead of the school tracks. So more freedom of choice, which I reckon is a good thing. The mandatory basics are still really solid.