Frequently on these forums, one hears "my mead is bubbling about once every five seconds," or the like. The intent, obviously, is to attempt to report the rate at which the fermentation is progressing in a fairly tangible unit that can be measured without disturbing the mead (as opposed to, say, change in SG per unit time). The problem with this is that the bubble rate scales (or at least, should intuitively) with the volume of the batch - that is, if you have five gallons of mead funneling all of its CO2 bubbles through one airlock, that will bubble five times as fast as one gallon of mead with the same airlock. This could potentially cause confusion for "NewBees," who might wonder why their JAO is bubbling 1/5 as fast as most of the other batches in the Mead Log; I certainly did.
So, I propose that we report our bubble rates scaled by the size of the batch - whether as the sole unit ("1 bubble per 20 seconds per gallon") or as extra parenthesized information ("bubbles every 4 seconds (1/20 Hz/Gal)") to make it more clear that it is not a problem for smaller batches to bubble more slowly and to facilitate comparisons between different-sized batches. This would add little effort to posting - just multiply your bubble time by 3, 5, 6, or however many gallons the batch contains - and has the potential to save a few NewBees from panicking over their (er, our) small batches.
Thoughts?
TL;DR: let's report bubble rates in Hz/Gal (bubbles per second per gallon) to reduce potential NewBee confusion
So, I propose that we report our bubble rates scaled by the size of the batch - whether as the sole unit ("1 bubble per 20 seconds per gallon") or as extra parenthesized information ("bubbles every 4 seconds (1/20 Hz/Gal)") to make it more clear that it is not a problem for smaller batches to bubble more slowly and to facilitate comparisons between different-sized batches. This would add little effort to posting - just multiply your bubble time by 3, 5, 6, or however many gallons the batch contains - and has the potential to save a few NewBees from panicking over their (er, our) small batches.
Thoughts?
TL;DR: let's report bubble rates in Hz/Gal (bubbles per second per gallon) to reduce potential NewBee confusion