I’m going to refine my height estimate to say that the building is probably more than 50 stories high. So I’ll approximate 10–15 feet per story. I’ll guess that these are probably 2 feet. I don’t know how tall one story is, but I know from other office buildings I’ve been in that the ceiling is at least 8 feet inside each floor and that there are typically false ceilings to hide electrical wires, conduits, heating ducts, and so on. I don’t know how tall the Empire State Building is, but I know that it is definitely more than 20 stories tall and probably less than 200 stories. I’m going to assume that the building has a square base and straight sides with no taper at the top, just to simplify the calculations.įor size I need to know height, length, and width.
I’m going to calculate the weight of the building empty-with no human occupants, no furnishings, appliances, or fixtures. One way to start would be to estimate its size, and then estimate the weight based on that. Add 15 percent to that number to account for travel time, meaning that there are approximately 58 piano tuners in Chicago. It would take 50 tuners to tune 50,000 pianos (50,000 pianos ÷ 1,000 pianos tuned by each piano tuner). In one year, a piano tuner can tune 1,000 pianos (2,000 hours per year ÷ 2 hours per piano). We decided to double this number to account for institutional pianos, so the result is 50,000 pianos. You might guess 2.5 million, meaning that 25,000 people have pianos. If you don’t know the answer to this, you might know that it is the third-largest city in the United States after New York (8 million) and Los Angeles (4 million). Now to estimate the number of people in Chicago. This estimate is trickier to base on facts, but assume that when these are factored in, they roughly equal the number of private pianos, for a total of 2 pianos for every 100 people. In addition, there are schools and other institutions with pianos, many of them with multiple pianos. Keep this in mind and take it off the estimate at the end.Īssumption 4: To estimate the number of pianos in Chicago, you might guess that 1 out of 100 people have a piano-again, a wild guess, but probably within an order of magnitude. Piano tuners travel to their jobs-people don’t bring their pianos in-so the piano tuner may spend 10 percent–20 percent of his or her time getting from house to house. Maybe it’s only 1 hour, but 2 is within an order of magnitude, so it’s good enough.Īssumption 3: How many hours a year does the average piano tuner work? Let’s assume 40 hours a week, and that the tuner takes 2 weeks’ vacation every year: 40 hours a week x 50 weeks is a 2,000-hour work year.
One time a year seems like a reasonable guesstimate.Īssumption 2: It takes 2 hours to tune a piano. It’s certainly within an order of magnitude: The average piano owner isn’t tuning only one time every ten years, nor ten times a year. Where did this number come from? I made it up! But that’s what you do when you’re approximating. Assumption 1: The average piano owner tunes his piano once a year.
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