The unexpected originality of ordinary works.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been researching, among other things, the balance of water consumed and released. The job is more than ordinary. What is easier, to calculate as accurately as possible how much water we pour into ourselves and how much we emit? And quite quickly, I discovered a certain unexpected oddity for me – a discrepancy.

I weighed myself net before going to the toilet and getting into bed for the last time, set the weight and went to the toilet “to allocate the accumulated afternoon water”. I got up in the morning, went to the toilet and drained the water that had accumulated overnight.

And weighed myself.

The difference between the last evening weighing and the morning one is, in theory, equal to the amount of fluid released.

Let’s say 700g (250 + 450g)

(Scales with a resolution of +/-50 g were used.)

That’s what I thought, and it turned out that it’s not quite true in the sense of the word “released”!

Recently, I began to collect the water allocated in the evening before going to bed and in the morning. It turned out that not 700 g, but only 475 g!

Where did the 225 missing grams go?

The temperature in the apartment is normal, because winter is outside, so there is no serious NOTICEABLE perspiration and the skin is also dry. The only explanation for the strange mismatch of the scales is the exhaling of steam. Again, the phenomenon is well-known and ordinary.

Unusual (for me!) QUANTITY! In eight hours of sleep, I exhaled 225 ml of water! Somehow I didn’t think that we exhale SO much. That means about 28 grams per hour!

We take an average of twenty breaths per minute.

Per hour – 1200. It turns out that with each exhale we exhale 23 mg of steam. It is quite possible, considering that with normal breathing, the area of the working lungs is about 30 square meters.

(With deep breaths, it increases to one hundred square meters.

That’s what’s good for the body and the heart, first of all, the simulation of yawning! Three times more oxygen diffuses into the alveolar capillaries!)

It turns out that without the slightest sweating, we exhale 672 ml/gram of water per day! Two large mugs of tea or coffee!

For experts in physiology, this “discovery” is certainly not a discovery.

But for me, who thought that even though we exhale moist air, it’s not that much in total!

In the textbook for medical institutes “Human Physiology” by Babsky, Zubkov, Kositsky, and Khodorov, I did not find a single mention of this effect.

Although I searched in the sections on respiration and the composition of inhaled and exhaled air, as well as in the sections on water-salt metabolism and its regulation.

Obviously, such a “little thing” is not worthy of studying in medical schools.

This means that I can safely add myself to the “researcher of unexplored phenomena and effects of physiology,” about which I have already written several notes.

Which is done again in this note!

Faciant meliora potentes.

If I’m wrong, let my seniors correct me.

18 II 2026