Saturday, February 18, 2012

Resistors



For my physics blog post this week I took a picture of my refrigerator because that’s an example of a resistor. Resistors can be found in a parallel and series circuit and can be any appliance that asks the charge to do work. When the charge does work, the current will slow down. Resistance is measure in Ohms (Ω) and can be found using the equation R = V/I, or “Ohm’s Law,” named after the famous German physicist, Georg Ohm. With this equation, it’s easy to see that resistance (R) and current (I) are inversely proportional. If you want more current, you need less resistance, and vice versa. 

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Home Electricity



My physic’s blog post for this week is about my home power usage. I took a picture of my electric bill from this past month and I found that my family’s electricity tab was $183. 29. When I compared this number with other people in my class, I had one of the lowest numbers. It says my family only spends $6.21 a day for electricity and since there are four people in my household, each person used about $45 of electricity the past month. The reason why my numbers are so low is because we have photovoltaic panels that we installed just last year and we have a water heater set up so our water isn’t constantly being heated 24/7. I thought analyzing my bill was really interesting because before I didn’t even what the average electricity bill was; but now after hearing a lot of other numbers from people, I see that having panels makes a big difference. 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

DC Circuits



For my physic’s blog post this week, I took a picture of my phone because in class today we learned about circuits and the two types; DC and AC circuits. My phone is an example of a DC circuit because when I’m charging my phone, the charges are only going one way…to my phone. My phone isn’t transferring charges back to the wall through the charger because it just doesn’t work like that. An example of an AC circuit would be the Apple computer charger. I think one of the most important things I learned today is that energy transfers instantaneously, but the charges do not. This is referred to “drift velocity”.