Here comes the trial by fire
I had a big pile of small change, gathered up from a major whole-house tidy.

Now as many of you will know, you can sit and feed this to supermarket self-checkouts, and they will give you more useful denominations (notes, even) as change. Great. But how do you know how much you have to begin with?

Well you can do what the banks do - sort the coins out (manually because you haven't got a machine for it) into piles of all the same denomination, then weigh them. All coins of a particular denomination are (supposed to be) the same weight. Given a set of digital scales that read down to one gram, you ought to be able to get a fairly good estimate of how much is in your pile of smash.

Lardies and Gintlepong, I present - Calculate My Smash!

www.gjcp.net/smash/

Just sort your smash out into piles, weigh the piles, feed them into this handy website and it will tell you how much money you really have. Don't forget that to even the most skint of us, piles of change are "invisible" money - why, even when you're pretty broke, do you empty the shrapnel out of your pockets onto the bedside table "to sort out later"? Because it's too fiddly to deal with.

Anyway, melt my server. Bug reports and feature requests in the comments, please.
(gordonjcp, Fri 11 Nov 2011, 23:43, 15 replies)

who the hell calls money smash?

( mictoboy shitting in your cunt since, Fri 11 Nov 2011, 23:45, closed)

Not me.
But I have heard it called that, perhaps it's a Scottish thing?
(anonymousreality tickled your fancy on, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 2:20, closed)

it gets better,
a 2p coin is exactly twice the weight of a 1p coin, so you don't need to separate the coppers.

10p pieces are also twice the weight of 5p pieces.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Fri 11 Nov 2011, 23:49, closed)

Lovely
thanks for that, I have altered the page to reflect that.
(gordonjcp, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 0:21, closed)

weights
1p = 3.5g = eighth
2p = 7g = quarter

(approx)
(fat stavros, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 4:11, closed)

Ha...
I was just thinking that :)

Also, doesn't a fiver weigh a gramme?
( snee held his breath since, Mon 14 Nov 2011, 12:07, closed)

Or you could just count it.
(Freakmandu, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 4:50, closed)

You *could* count it...
... but then at this stage of gathering together all the little piles of change I'm up to over a kilo of 1ps which is over 300 them. It takes long enough sorting them into piles, why make it take even longer?
(gordonjcp, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 8:58, closed)

Count them as you're sorting them into piles?
(Freakmandu, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 9:43, closed)

Could do.
I'm crap at counting, though. This is less of a disadvantage in mathematics than you might think.
(gordonjcp, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 11:10, closed)

How
does having to buy a set of scales save me money?
(MayorBoris, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 9:40, closed)

why would i want to weigh piles of instant mashed potato?

( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Sat 12 Nov 2011, 10:19, closed)

I just stick my smash into a large tin
and every 6 months or so cart it down to Tesco to empty it into the Coinstar machine. OK, so they cream off 8% or whatever it is, but that's still 92% for me and I haven't had to waste time weighing or counting the bloody stuff.
(Reverend Fister "a disciplined fuckwit", Mon 14 Nov 2011, 11:37, closed)

What's wrong with you all????
Most supermarkets now have a machine to count coins. You just tip it all in and you get a receipt/voucher to take off your shopping bill.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Mon 14 Nov 2011, 17:05, closed)

yes
but that takes about 7-10% of it.

That said, check your banks local branch (if you have such a thing). Natwest at least have a similar machine that pays directly into your account, and doesn’t charge anything.
(bblgoose, Tue 15 Nov 2011, 13:15, closed)