Academia Ghetto Thread

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Looks like I'm escorting him from lunch to the department head's office today.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I have a seemingly unsolvable problem in physics concerning how much money a family would save over switching from an electrical heating thing to a heat pump. My answer was essentially "insufficient data"

Obviously I'm going everyone else came to the save conclusion. Also, I have a procedure for my independent study that starts tomorrow and hopefully has results by Friday. I might document my progress here as well as in my notebook for shits and giggles

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have a seemingly unsolvable problem in physics concerning how much money a family would save over switching from an electrical heating thing to a heat pump. My answer was essentially "insufficient data"

Obviously I'm going everyone else came to the save conclusion. Also, I have a procedure for my independent study that starts tomorrow and hopefully has results by Friday. I might document my progress here as well as in my notebook for shits and giggles

That indeed sounds like insufficient data, if you ask me, but I barely skated through physics with a B+ and I plan to re-take it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am currently experiencing a combination of pure rage and pure WTFever toward my advisor, because last term I asked her about traveling to Germany and she was super supportive about it, but when I asked her about proposed dates she had a goddamn hissy-fit about it that very nearly suggested that I might as well just not even bother being a graduate student because it would be so fucking inconvenient for her.

You know what I don't especially like? Giant adult babies who are in authority positions because higher education puts inexperienced children into administration. Any stay-at-home-mom with five years childrearing has more emotional intelligence than your average career academic. Any retail worker has minimum 200 times more human engineering experience than any mom or career academic. This shit is a goddamn mess, and in order to get into any position in which I could remotely address any of this garbage, I will have to put up with it for at least six more years.

Academia is mostly children, is the takeaway.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

What changed? I had a TAship, and she wants me to have an RAship.

That's all. That's it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am just going to be a fucking asshole and tell her

if you want my brain in your fucking lab, you might just have to let me have a couple weeks off.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have a seemingly unsolvable problem in physics concerning how much money a family would save over switching from an electrical heating thing to a heat pump. My answer was essentially "insufficient data"

Obviously I'm going everyone else came to the save conclusion. Also, I have a procedure for my independent study that starts tomorrow and hopefully has results by Friday. I might document my progress here as well as in my notebook for shits and giggles

Are you supposed to do research in your area to determine which is cheaper for the same monetary outlay? That should be doable.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The odd thing about it is that it's not a physics question, but a civics question, because cost depends on the price of gas vs. electricity in your area.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

The two are unrelated, the independent study I just have to get phage from E. faecalis

here's the problem from the book:
(II) How much less per year would it cost a family to operate a heat pump that has a coefficient of performance of 2.9 than an electric heater that costs $2000 to heat their home for a year? If the conversion to the heat pump costs $15,000, how long would it take the family to break even on the heating costs? How much would the family save in 20 years?

From the previous questions, "II" seems to indicate that the question deals with heat pumps rather than refrigerators, which isn't helpful. I have the formula for COP, but only one variable, and no indication of how much heating is being done for $2000 by the electric heater, etc.

[Vanadium Gryllz]

Do they give you the COP for an electric heater anywhere in the question? From that you could calculate total work done maybe...

It certainly looks like not enough info from what you've posted.

[LMNO]

On the face of it, it seems like you'd need the coefficient of performance for the electric heater as well, wouldn't you?

Unless the electric heater is considered to have a coefficient of 1, since it looks like the point of the heat pump is to not just create heat (as an electric heater would), but circulate existing heat as well.

If so, you have 1=$2000, and so 2.9=X (which should be less than $2k - I don't know the formulas being used)

The conversion costs would be $15k / ($2k-X), which is the amount of savings per year divided by the cost of the installation.

The savings would = ($2k-X) * Y years (Y being 20 years - the number of years to pay off the conversion)



Keep in mind, it's been a really long time since I did this stuff, and I could be horribly, horribly wrong. 

[Vanadium Gryllz]

From here: http://www.powerknot.com/how-efficient-is-your-air-conditioning-system.html

Consider a simple electric heater. All of the electricity that is input to the unit is converted to heat. There is no waste and the power output (in heat) equals the power input (in electricity), so the COP is one. The COP can be used to describe any system, not just heating and cooling.

So it looks like LMNO's assumption there was correct.

Maybe if we say 2.9 = 2000/W we can get the Work for a heat pump annually being equivalent to $670 (assuming, as Nigel pointed out, that price-per-unit values for gas and electricity are the same) and therefore $1310 savings annually.

Plugging these into LMNO's sums gives... $15k/$1.31 = 11.45 years to break even,

and savings = 1310*8.55 = $11200 over 20 years.


Disclaimer: I may be wrong.

[Freeky]

What changed? I had a TAship, and she wants me to have an RAship.

That's all. That's it.

Research Assistantship? 

Also, that's a pile of bullshit, Nigel.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Hmm. Damn. That makes sense. Thanks guys

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

What changed? I had a TAship, and she wants me to have an RAship.

That's all. That's it.

Research Assistantship? 

Also, that's a pile of bullshit, Nigel.

Yes.

At least I'm mad.