New Gear-Weight Calculator available for testing

[tleaf]

I did start an Excel spread sheet years ago that I never really kept up to date, but the excercise was still worthwhile. Might be time for me to revisit this task using this site.

 

Recommendation... you want to add a place to enter climbers height & weight. Then you could show us what our ideal weight and weight savings would be! Not easy to do but probably much less expensive for me to lose 5-20 pounds of body fat than shell out a bunch of cash on lightweight gear.

 

 

[WeighMyGear]

I did start an Excel spread sheet years ago that I never really kept up to date, but the excercise was still worthwhile. Might be time for me to revisit this task using this site.

 

Recommendation... you want to add a place to enter climbers height & weight. Then you could show us what our ideal weight and weight savings would be! Not easy to do but probably much less expensive for me to lose 5-20 pounds of body fat than shell out a bunch of cash on lightweight gear.

 

 

Hey tleaf,

 

Yep, I think yours is the perfect scenario to begin using this app. I know a lot of people do keep spreadsheets, which they've spent years maintaining, and I can understand they just don't want to spend the time to transfer the data. But if you're starting from scratch anyway, this app does offer a couple benefits over a spreadsheet. For one, since it's online, you can access your gear lists from any online computer anywhere. And two, some of its built-in functions (i.e. print and share) will generate those lists in a nice, clean checklist format.

 

Regarding your recommendation, yes, that would definitely be neat, but I think there would be too many variables to account for to make it accurate. For one, we would need to have separate weight data for each size of each item. Although we do, already, try to do this when we can (when the data's available), I think it might not be feasible to get even the majority of items listed by size. Even if we could attain a high number of items by size, apparel sizes definitely range differently from one manufacturer to another. So, although I may be a solid medium in one brand, I might be a small or a large in another. I could go on.

 

Thanks, though, for your idea. Keep them coming! We'll constantly try to improve this! Bear with us while we do and enjoy!

[Fromage]

Clever concept, well done.

 

For future iterations of this application, how about crowd-sourcing weight data from users? There is widespread recognition that manufacturer claimed weight can often vary from user observed weight. Why not allow users to enter their observed weights of pieces of gear into your database which you can then report back?

 

For example, the Acme Summit Supply claims that their Bitchin' Jacket weighs 19 oz. You report that in the application as the Manufacturer Reported Weight. Climber Bob buys one in medium, weighs it, and enters in your database that his jacket actually registers at 21.3 oz. This is repeated numerous times by numerous individuals and soon you have a sample set of data that you can analyze. Then you publish a second measurement: Average User Reported Weight, which is the arithmetic mean of all the weights observed by different users. Each successive data point submitted by a user gets automatically added to the calculation and updated.

 

This will have a couple meaningful uses for future users of your application. For one, it will give prospective buyers of products a realistic expectation of what certain pieces of gear are observed to weigh in the real world. Second, it will potentially provide more reliable data than manufacturers furnish. Third, if enough individuals submit their own observed weights, the effects of outliers on the variance will be diminished.

[WeighMyGear]

Clever concept, well done.

 

For future iterations of this application, how about crowd-sourcing weight data from users? There is widespread recognition that manufacturer claimed weight can often vary from user observed weight. Why not allow users to enter their observed weights of pieces of gear into your database which you can then report back?

 

For example, the Acme Summit Supply claims that their Bitchin' Jacket weighs 19 oz. You report that in the application as the Manufacturer Reported Weight. Climber Bob buys one in medium, weighs it, and enters in your database that his jacket actually registers at 21.3 oz. This is repeated numerous times by numerous individuals and soon you have a sample set of data that you can analyze. Then you publish a second measurement: Average User Reported Weight, which is the arithmetic mean of all the weights observed by different users. Each successive data point submitted by a user gets automatically added to the calculation and updated.

 

This will have a couple meaningful uses for future users of your application. For one, it will give prospective buyers of products a realistic expectation of what certain pieces of gear are observed to weigh in the real world. Second, it will potentially provide more reliable data than manufacturers furnish. Third, if enough individuals submit their own observed weights, the effects of outliers on the variance will be diminished.

 

Hey Fromage, thanks for your great feedback. You raise many great points. In fact, much of what you're suggesting was/is already in the works. If you hadn't already noticed, registered users have always been able to enter their gear into the community database, or even enter custom weights for gear that is already in the database. So, we're already storing all that data.

 

However, the problem we're facing in making the system as automated as possible in recognizing multiples of the same item, is the wide variation of how users enter the gear name and its size.

 

When it comes to custom weights entered for gear already in the database, it's not such a problem, because the name and size is being entered as we already had it listed. But for new, user-entered items, there needs to be some degree of uniformity/similarity among the entries of the same items in order for the system to recognize they are, in fact, the same item. Unfortunately, we still seem to be lacking that uniformity. I hope that all makes sense.

 

Anyway, we'll eventually work toward the goal you're suggesting. We'll be updating our interface at some point to better facilitate the uniformity we need.

 

Thanks again for taking the time to present such a detailed suggestion!