As a sort of experiment, I decided to see how much certain appliances in my house cost my parents. At first, as a control, I unplugged everything and I even switched off the fridge. This is to prevent another thing consuming electricity and compromising the results. On my list of appliances was: 1) the electric kettle, 2) the toaster, 3) all the integrated lights turned on, 4) the projector, sound system, and blu-ray player, (everything needed to watch a movie). I tried each one individually, switching them off as I was finished with them to make sure the next appliance was the only thing consuming. The way I got my results was that I timed myself for one minute and counted how many times I saw the red line (black in my case) on the rotating piece of metal under the numbers indicating the watts consumed. I tried each appliance three times to make sure I got an average and here is what the results looked like:

Here is an average of the rotations:

On the electric meter, it was indicated that 187.5 revolutions (rotations of the line) was equal to 1 kilo watt. This means that if the line revolved 187 and a half times, the numbers on top would be bigger by one unit. To find out how many watts were used in only one turn, I did a simple 3 rule. 1000 watts is equal to 1 kilo watt.

per turn

And then, I calculated how much each appliance used in watts by multiplying the number of watts per rotation with the number of turns I counted for the appliances..

Kettle=

Toaster=

Lights=

Projector and Co.=

I then went on to find out how much it cost money-wise. On a recent electricity bill, I saw the price at:

14.10 cents per kilo watt.

The problem was that my previous calculations weren’t in kilo watts but in watts. Once I had the watts, I had to simply divide by 1000 to convert them to kilo watts, and multiply by the price (14.10 cents) and then convert the price to euros (divide by 100).
Here is a table with the appliance, the number of watts consumed, and the price:

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Since I was in my molecules and atoms period, I also tried doing this experiment: Measuring the Diameter of a Molecule. The experiment was found on a school website. I read the essay summarising the experiment and I thought the concept was pretty simple. It was basically filling out a rectangular straight-sided pan with water and to make sure the water bulged over the side of the pan. Then a wire rod was to be placed over the water near the middle of the pan. It had to just lightly touch the water. A single drop of oil was to be dropped into the middle of 1 section created by the rod. The oil was then to spread out over the surface of the water and when it had covered the whole surface between the side of the pan and the side of rod, the rod was to be moved another couple of inches to allow the oil to spread even more. It continued liked this until you were supposed to see the oil starting to break up and see fissures in what should look like a very thin blanket of oil over the water. As soon as this happened the rod must be left alone and the length and width of the oil blanket must be measured. The idea was that all the molecules started spreading out and just before the cracks could come, they would all be flatly the one beside the other, making the oil one molecule thick. A calculation was then given out to find out the height of these molecules. Volume=Length*Width*Height

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Assuming the drop was 1 cubic millimetre and the oil’s length was 400 mm and the width was 300 mm:

××

×

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0.00000833mm is the supposed height of one oil molecule. If you want more details on this experiment, visit the site, but details were my exact problem.

When I tried this experiment I did everything the experiment told me to do. The thing is, it doesn’t tell you a lot. A lot of variables that need to be known are not explained, for example, the type of oil, the amount of time the experiment takes, or even the water temperature. I used olive oil because it was the only oil I had. I wasn’t able to reproduce this experiment even though I tried three times. The first time I used ambient temperature water and a tiny drop of oil from the tip of a needle. It didn’t work. The second time I used ambient temperature water again but this time with a slightly larger drop which I think was roughly 1 cubic mm. I used a pipette for the drop this time. This time it seemed to actually spread but it spread out into a bigger drop VERY SLOWLY. I left it overnight and in the morning the drop had clung on the edge of my pan and it had broken down into several bubbles. The third time I used the same amount of oil but I used hot water. This time the drop didn’t even bother spreading.

My conclusion is that I have no idea if the proposed answer they gave could be right or if it is downright wrong. If it is wrong then the experiment was probably found somewhere else and it was probably not carried out before putting it on their website. If it is right, then whoever wrote out the experiment did not do it properly because I could not carry it out due to missing details.

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