Cubic Feet to Gallons for Dummies

How many gallons in a cubic foot?

The old saying goes, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime"...the same goes for a woman, obviously. In the age of the internet. a lot of people are being handed a fish instead of a fishing lesson, and today we're going to have a look at one such single-meal post. The site is Sciencing.com (it used to be part of eHow, of course) and the perp is David Chandler, caught here attempting to explain "How to Calculate the Gallons per Cubic Foot."¹

Our staffers came up with a couple of different approaches to this question. Generally, you could determine the weight of a cubic foot of liquid and use the liquid's density to back-calculate the weight per gallon, then do a little division, like this:

Water weighs  62.43 pounds per cubic foot A gallon of water weighs 8.345 pounds A cubic foot contains 62.43 / 8.345 = 7.48 gallons. There are other ways, of course, but  that's probably the easiest. What does Chandler say, however? Well, David opens by saying, in his friggin' introduction, that "...one cubic foot equals about 7.48 gallons of liquid. To convert cubic feet to gallons, simply multiply the volume in cubic feet by 7.48 for the liquid volume in gallons"

See why we flagged Chandler's post for the Dumbass of the Day award? He didn't produce instructions for calculating the gallons per cubic foot – well, he did quickly run through them in the introduction -- instead, he blurted out the conversion factor and then used 120 words or so (gotta meet that minimum word count!) explaining how to calculate the number of gallons in a tank!

Instead of teaching the OQ to fish, Chandler handed him the "fish" -- a ready-made conversion factor -- and then motored quickly away. We don't know about you, but any fifth-grade teacher would be ashamed of that sort of "answer" to a how-to question, hence David's Dumbass of the Day nomination and award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   sciencing.com/calculate-gallons-per-cubic-foot-5985285.html

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