Up, Up, and Away!

O: balloons per ounce

C: ounces per pound

H: pound per house

B: number of balloons needed to lift house

Formula

B = CH/O

The average 2 - story, 5 bedroom house is around 3,000 square feet and weighs around 200 tons, or 400,000 pounds. In order to find out how many balloons can lift a house, we need to consider the lifting power of helium. The weight of helium is 0.011 pounds compared to air's weight of 0.182 pounds, making helium lighter than air itself. This makes sense being that helium only has 2 significant figures whereas air has three. The lifting power of helium is 0.078 pounds per cubic foot, and the standard 11'' balloon has a volume of 0.52 cubic feet.

This is the work for finding how many pounds per balloon

The work to find "O" in the formula

The work for the entire formula to find "B"

It would take 9,876,543.21 balloons to lift a house weighing 4 x 10^5 pounds.

       Overall, I feel my final answer is solid because I used a realistic system to find both my educated guess and with research, the final answer. Though my final answer was not extremely close to my educated guess, both answers are within the same ballpark. I must say that I am surprised that my final answer is less than my educated guess. For my researched answer, the weight of the house is 5 x 10^5 pounds heavier than my predicted 350,000 pounds. I guessed my final answer would have required more balloons because there was more weight to lift. A potential error that could have effected my answer is the true weight of an average 2 - story, 5 bedroom house. No one has actually weighed a house this size, so the number is a very close estimate to the actual weight.

       Some interesting facts I've learned while doing this project are that there are approximately 70 standard #2 pencils per square foot, and it would take about 210,000 pencils to fill up a house that's 3,000 square feet. Another fact I've learned is that my final answer are the numbers 1 through 9 backwards. Other facts I've learned is that in order to find the volume of a sharpened pencil, you have to use two separate formulas, one for the tip (a cone), and another for the rest of the pencil, which is a cylindrical hexagon. The information I have found through my project can be applied to similar, more grand - scale questions such as "How many balloons would it take to lift a skyscraper?" or "How many balloons would take to lift the Eiffel Tower?". This information may also be useful for people who work with hot air balloons, scientists who may be considering lifting large objects with helium filled balloons, or those conducting experiments similar to my project.