Home & Life
Five calculators for the things a household actually argues about: how much paint to buy, what a meal really cost, what the move will run to, where the electricity bill came from, and how old the dog is.
5 tools in Home & Life
- Electricity Bill CalculatorEstimate a bill from your own tariff, including the standing or monthly fixed charge, or build the usage up from appliance wattages.
- Moving Cost EstimatorAdd up a move from your own quoted rates — hourly crew, weight and surcharges, or a rental truck — with the charges people forget.
- Paint & Wallpaper CalculatorWork out how much paint or wallpaper a room needs, from a published coverage figure you choose, with coats, doors and windows accounted for.
- Pet Age Calculator in Human YearsYour dog or cat in human years, using the AVMA rule, the 2020 epigenetic clock and AAHA life stages rather than multiplying by seven.
- Recipe Cost Calculator & SplitterPrice a recipe from what the packs cost, converting a 1 kg bag against 250 g used, then split it by serving or between people.
What ties five unrelated tools together
Not a subject. What these share is a shape: each one takes a handful of measurements you can make yourself — a wall, a receipt, a meter reading, a birthday — and turns them into a number you would otherwise guess at. None of them needs anything you would have to look up, buy or ask a company for.
That constraint is also why the category is small. A household tool that needs your supplier’s current unit rate, your local labour costs or a manufacturer’s figure is a tool that is wrong for most people most of the time, so those are not here. The electricity bill calculator is the clearest example of the rule being kept: it does not know your tariff, it asks for it, including the standing or monthly fixed charge that most online estimates quietly ignore and that dominates a small bill.
- Paint & Wallpaper Calculator
- Wall dimensions and a coat count, minus the doors and windows you are not painting.
- Recipe Cost Calculator & Splitter
- What a dish costs per portion from the price of what went into it, and how to split it.
- Moving Cost Estimator
- Costing a move priced by crew hours, by shipment weight, or by driving it yourself.
- Electricity Bill Calculator
- A bill from your own tariff, or usage built up from appliance wattages.
- Pet Age Calculator in Human Years
- A dog or cat in human years, without the multiply-by-seven folklore.
Estimates, and how wrong they are allowed to be
Every tool in this group states what it assumed, because a household estimate is only useful if you can see which assumption to override. Paint coverage depends on the surface and on the colour underneath it, so the coverage figure is an input rather than a constant. A recipe costed from your own receipt is not the same recipe costed from anyone else’s. A move priced by the hour and the same move priced by weight are two different quotes, which is why the moving estimator asks which one you were given instead of assuming. The arithmetic here is exact; the inputs are yours, and the answer is only ever as good as they are.
Before you buy the paint
Why does the paint calculator want the number of doors and windows?
Because a wall with two windows and a door in it can easily be a fifth smaller than the same wall measured corner to corner, and a fifth of a room is most of a tin. Subtracting openings is the difference between buying two tins and buying three.
Is multiplying a dog’s age by seven really wrong?
It is a rule of thumb that was never more than that, and it is worst at both ends of a life — a one-year-old dog is nothing like a seven-year-old child, and large breeds age far faster in later years than small ones. The pet age tool shows the veterinary life-stage reading and the epigenetic-clock reading alongside each other rather than picking one for you.