Amff and Quaff

I bought my first electric vehicle (EV) recently: a 2017 Chevy Bolt with a new battery. With electric comes a whole new way to think about fueling it up. It takes hours and hours to fill up but you can do it at home. So that’s cool.

It didn’t take me long to figure out how to mentally calculate how long it would take to charge at 240V and 32A, or about 7.680kW. Taking into account that charging isn’t 100% efficient. It takes about 30 minutes to charge one notch on the fuel gauge (there are 20 notches).

The real problem is with kWhs. Of all the units for energy – joule, BTU, calorie, etc. – it is the most awkward. I have a master’s degree in EE and I find it difficult to say kW or kWh in the right context.

It has the same issues as light-year without the charm. A light-year is a unit of distance but is often misunderstood as a time. Still, we love it because it is fun to say and it tells us how old the light is from the star that is some number of light-years away. kWh is neither cool to say nor is it very useful. No one talks about how many kilowatts their circuit can deliver; its volts and amps.

Last Wednesday, I was out running and thinking through it. “15 amp hours at 240V for each notch. My car takes 32 amps and the cars battery capacity is 60 kWh. I needed something else to distinguish amps from amp hours and kilowatts from kilowatt-hours so I came up with amff and quaff.

Amff should be pretty obvious. You put amp together with an ‘h’ for hour and you get amph. Except, I wanted to use an ‘f’ because it appears similar to an integral sign (∫) and an amff is an amp integrated over an hour of time. Why two ‘f’s? I think it makes it more substantial.

Quaff is similar except you might expect a ’th’ sound at the end (i.e. kwath). However, I learned Portuguese as a young man living in Portugal and I gained an appreciation for how difficult it is for many in the world to say the dental fricative, just as it was difficult for me to say their lh sound.

One quaff is equal to 3.6M joules of energy in terms of SI units. This makes sense since a joule is a watt-second

When charging something with quaffs, it can be called quaffing. For example, the car is quaffing. Now, my family says things like “don’t forget to quaff the car when you get home.”