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Every day when I get home I empty out my pockets of loose change and put them into a large glass waterbottle that sits behind my desk. Eventually this bottle becomes too heavy to move and I empty it out to reclaim some cash for toys.
It occurred to me that there might be a way to estimate how much money was in the bottle by averaging out weights a little bit. Since my current 'hottest toy' want is a new Canon digital SLR camera, my 'go for it' point is somewhere around $750. The Coinstar machines now support converting your cash directly into a credit at Amazon without the 9% 'fee' they normally extract. Yay! But do I have enough?
I started by finding out the weight of an empty glass bottle (the web knows all - 15lbs). Then I weighed the bottle with all the coins in it (67lbs), which gives me about 52lbs of coinage to work with.
Because I don't really have a distribution chart showing how many coins of each type I have, I assumed an even distribution. There's probably more pennies than quarters, but I've never sorted things out. When I run the Coinstar dump, it'll tell me how many of each coin I have, and that will make this more accurate the next time I do it.
Given that, some more googling gave me coin weights, so I was able to work it out...
Coin Value Weight(g) Penny 0.01 2.5g Nickel 0.05 5g Dime 0.10 2.68g Quarter 0.25 5.6g Average weight: 3.945g Average value: 0.10 Approximately .10 per 3.945grams or 0.025 cents per gram
Cool. My bottle has 52lbs of coins in it, which is around 23kilograms, which works out to around $544.00 worth of coins
Not quite there yet, but if I wait much longer, I may not be able to move the bottle. Maybe Zach and I will make an excursion to the Coinstar machine and shovel coins into it for a half hour, and see how accurate my numbers are.
Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Life. Don't talk to me about life.
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