Gadgetory

so when you get your home energy bill it lists the usage in kilowatt hours but when you go to the store you'll see things like 12 watt light bulbs 9 volt batteries and vacuum cleaners with 15 amps of sucking power but what do these numbers even mean I mean why do we have so many different units to measure something that seems as straightforward as electricity surprisingly the answer isn't just so appliance companies and physics professors can confuse you it's because several important things have to happen in an electrical circuit for electricity to flow and for work to be done you can think of a circuit kind of like the faucet on your kitchen sink if you want water to come out you need two things you need the water itself and some pressure to force it through the pipes out your faucet and into your neti pot similarly an electrical circuit uses electrons to carry the electricity kind of like the water in our faucet analogy but those electrons need something to push them along a circuit this electrical pressure is what we call the voltage and is often provided by two terminals one with a positive charge and one with a negative charge so on a battery electrons flow from the negative end through whatever it is you're trying to power and then into the positive end where they'll stay unless your battery is rechargeable if you're plugging something into the wall this voltage is instead provided by your power company and although voltage just measures how strongly electricity is being pushed through a circuit it's important because many circuits are designed only to accept a certain number of volts which is why the hairdryer you bought in Monaco might release magic blue smoke if you plug it in in New York so now that you know what volts are what about amps well in this context amp isn't short for to fire but rather for ampere which is a unit of how much electrical charge is flowing past a given point in one second so when you put volts and amps together you can tell how much current is flowing and how hard it's flowing multiply these numbers and you get finally our third unit the watt let's go back to our water analogy for a second let's suppose you wanted to spin a small water wheel because you just like watching things spin or I don't know maybe you have it hooked up to a generator let's say you have a really powerful water pistol that forces water through a tiny nozzle even though the small nozzle means the total volume of water flowing per second isn't all that much you wouldn't want to fill your swimming pool with it the high pressure creates a strong jet that can spin the wheel easily but suppose instead of a water gun you have a much wider hose that doesn't push the water out nearly as strongly but because the hose is a lot wider more water flows per second overall and the wheel ends up spinning at the same speed it did with your water gun if we think of the hose and the water gun pushing out electricity instead of water we could say that they're delivering the same number of watts for a more practical example let's say you have an 1100 watt power supply for your computer that's drawing full load because you're rocking four-way SLI or something so if you plug that into a standard 110-volt North American outlet some simple math tells you that 10 amps of current is running through your power supply but if you take that same power supply and use it with a 220 volt European outlet you're only drawing 5 amps but since the amount of power in watts is the same your computer will work just fine in both places even though you're using different volts and amps well that makes sense Linus but why the heck then is my energy bill in kilowatt-hours is that a unit of time no actually scientists are just mean it's a unit of energy watts and kilowatts express how much energy is consumed per chunk of time something scientists call power which is not the same as energy but if you multiply a kilowatt by an hour the unit's cancel and you're left with a number that shows how much energy that you hogged by running your air conditioner gaming rig and novelty lava lamp all at once but what if you're more concerned about battery capacity instead of what's coming out of your walls well if you're buying a replacement battery or a battery pack you might see their capacity listed in milliamp hours again not time doing the math shows that this is a unit of charge not energy or power so going back to our water example this is like how much water you have in a bucket not how much is flowing or how fast is flowing so a bigger bucket means you could charge your phone more times and you can learn more about that and battery banks in this video here so go forth then with your newfound knowledge and expertly buy the right voltage adapter install the correct power supply or just aced your electrical engineering exam if you want to do more with your life than work for some second-rate YouTube channel but hey John second-rate YouTube channel 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