Amperage for Dummy Electricians

Amps to watts formula

Many greedy internet writers like to use the freelancer's "one simple trick." They find themselves a topic and milk it for all it's worth, changing around words and sentences to stay one step ahead of the plagiarism police. That seems to have been the M.O. of eHowian Sarah Celebi, whose skimpy catalog at the mother lode of misinformation was, shall we saw, heavy on articles about wiring and electricity (11 of her 13 posts)... a topic about which she apparently knew very little. If you want proof of that lack of knowledge, you need look no further than her eHow.co, post, "How to Convert Amp to Kwh [sic]."

Such conversion is quite simple: you first determine the amperage drawn by the device(s) in question and multiply that number by the voltage of the circuit to get total wattage. Once you know the wattage, you multiply it by the number of hours the device operates, divide the product by 1000, and presto: KWH. That's three little steps that, in our rather wordy explanation, takes less than fifty words. Of course, Celebi was required by DMS¹ to pad that out to at least 300 words, and that's where Sarah got into trouble. Check out this twaddle:

"There is a relationship between current, resistance, voltage and the work done by an electric circuit. All these factors work together in the circuit to safely convey electrical energy throughout the house."

We're pretty sure that resistance, voltage, and work don't so squat to "safely convey electricity": that's the job of insulated wires, circuit breakers, and trained electricians. It sure ain't the job of Celebi...

Celebi's instructions, which run to 400-plus words, boil down to the following:

1. "Find out what the required current for the circuit is. The first piece of information needed is the current (I), which is measured in a unit called amps. Current can be found by using Ohm's Law. For example, if the voltage and resistance are known for an appliance, the current can be found by dividing the voltage (E) or (V) by the resistance (R)." – Give us a break, idiot: you read the amperage off the appliance nameplate, not determine it with Ohm's law!
2. "Obtain the voltage ratings... The value of the voltage also can be obtained if power and current are known by dividing power (P) by current (I) and getting the value in volts." – Again, idiot, you either know that the device runs on 110V or read the nameplate... sheesh!
3. "Substitute the values obtained from step 1 and 2 in the equation: P(kW) = I(A) × V(V) / 1000." – Well, at least she got that right; not that the OQ probably understood it.

What Celebi most likely did not understand is that the OQ wanted to figure out the cost to run his saltwater aquarium pump or a couple of ceiling fans given the amperage of the devices in question. It ain't rocket science, Sarah: they don't need to know about Ohm's Law, they don't need a bunch of padding about commercial buildings, all they need to know is how to convert amps to watts. If they aren't smart enough to take it from there, it's only a few more words. On the other hand, you can be a Dumbass of the Day like Celebi and confuse the bejeepers out of them with about a bazillion words of useless padding. That earned her fifteen bucks, but it also earned eHow even more (well-deserved) scorn. ¹ DMS, or Demand Media Studios, was the parent company of eHow. It changed its name to Leaf Group a couple of years ago, but it's still the same junk content.

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