Today, I thought I'd point out a few of the problems people have with electronics and offer a little explanation about some of the inconsistencies regarding to the various related technologies. The reason your phone can go an extremely long time without recharging some days and other days seems to need constant recharging is that electronics is not an exact science, but has many variables that make precision impossible to achieve. When I was in college, one of my electronics professors called the field the exact science of approximation.

An electronic circuit often contains hundreds, thousands, or perhaps even millions or billions of separate pathways, all depending on what the circuit is, how it is wired, and what each separate component does. Electric circuits such as older lights generally operate through only a single electrical pathway, but such circuits are exceedingly rare in the electronic world, where simple circuits are almost never possible. An LED light bulb, for example, consists of several electric paths that work together to ensure that the bulb provides steady, consistent lighting, due to the nature of an LED. I'm not going to go into detail about the nature of an LED, I'm just using it as an example of how complex even simple electronic devices can be.

Because there are so many pathways, a circuit is therefore difficult to predict with regards to how much energy is being used, since each pathway will draw power in its own way. This fact must be regarded more so by the possibility that multiple pathways of the circuit might be drawing power from the source simultaneously, like my earlier example of the LED light bulb. The number of pathways requiring energy at any one time effects the amount of power being drawn by the circuit overall, as do other factors, such as what components are found in each pathway. It should also be noted that any pathway in a circuit can be further subdivided into more pathways, which is how you can end up with millions or billions of potential paths in a device.

Furthermore, actual electric power is not a measurable quantity, although it can be obtained by measuring two electric values that can be measured, these most being voltage and amperage. Voltage, also known as energy, is what drives amperage, also known as current, and power is the product of these two factors together, both generally and mathematically literally. The meter on the back of your home measures kilowatt hours, by reading the amount of current passing through the house throughout the day and multiplying that by the voltage supplied.

All of these factors can complicate the way we view electricity, and because common words are used with these descriptions, confusion is frequent, and often inevitable. The term A/hr on some batteries, for example, stands for ampere hour and is an approximation of how long the battery is capable of providing a charge of one ampere for. An electric lawn mower will often come with two batteries, one rated 4 A/hr and one labeled 2 A/hr, but the mower never runs for a full hour on a fully charged battery, let alone two or four as the rating appears to imply. This is because the mower usually drains between six and eight amperes while in use, so the 4 A/hr battery is unlikely to last more than about forty minutes, provided it isn't taxed much.

Finally, it should be noted that electronic device manufacturers are not trying to deceive customers, they simply don't have a more accurate way to describe what their circuits, batteries, and other hardware uses. To further complicate things, simple electronic components are nearly impossible to produce with precise ratings so exact measurements are just as difficult to achieve. And even if an electronic device has nothing but the most precise components, there is still no way to know what its exact energy draw will be because there are far too many possibilities to make such measurements possible.