Washing Machine Volume for Dummies

Washing machine tub

Here at the Antisocial Network we see a lot of freelancers who have a tenuous grasp of even simple mathematics. You'd like to think that somewhere along the line math mistakes would be corrected, especially at the old eHow.com websites where it was (allegedly) checked by content editors. That was not, however, always the case – and it wasn't the case in this HomeSteady.com article by Athena Hessong: "How to Calculate a Washing Machine's Capacity."

Hessong, appearing in these pages for her ninth award, went straight to elementary math to write her post. After all, the drum – that big, round compartment that holds the laundry – is cylindrical, so Athena (aka Crystal) went straight to the formula for volume of a cylinder:

V = πr²h

Unfortunately, Athena must have been a little vague about that number "²" that appears in the formula, because here's how she said to calculate the volume of said cylinder: "...measure across the width of the washing machine drum to determine its diameter..." "...[measure] from the top of the washer to the bottom to find the depth of the drum..." "Multiply the diameter by... pi." "Multiply this number by the depth... find the volume..."

Ummm Athena? Crystal? That's not the volume; that's the area of the wall of the drum! In other words, you've found the area, in square units, of a rectangle that's been curved to form a cylinder: one side is the height of the drum, while the other is the perimeter of the drum (pi times the diameter). Idjit – and what idjit "content editor" let a mistake like that pass, anyway?
And people wonder how we can go back to the eHow well so often and keep finding Dumbass of the Day candidates...

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