eli5 does folding a shirt one way over another method change its volume occupied in a suitcase
In: 55
If you include tiny pockets of air within the folded up shirt, sure, technically. Practically? No
Folding it in different ways to achieve different shapes (long cylinder, ball, roughly cube, etc) may allow it to fit in different areas but it should basically be the same volume.
See also: packing problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems), although maybe not as applicable to something as malleable as a tshirt.
No if the there is not enough clothes to apply pressure on the shirt. Yes if the suitcase is full and you are applying pressure on it. When pressure is applied it is the ratio of the force applied to the surface area over which the force is applied. The force applied perpendicular to the surface of an object per unit area over which that force is distributed. So if you folded the shirt differently you could get pressure applied differently on it, and the physical properties dictate how much volume it occupies with that pressure inside your suitcase.
Depends on how you define the volume of the shirt. If the volume is only the actual physical material that composes the shirt, then nothing non destructive will affect its volume. If you are referring to the volume of the suitcase dedicated exclusively to the shirt and all of the air contained within the shirt, then yes.
I find that while rolling it doesn’t necessarily make it smaller, it’s easier to pack more into the suitcase.
Be wary though, easy to overfill the bag just because you can fit it. Learned this the hard way with a heavy backpack on a European trip. Had to ditch some items.
Phew, I was worried my shirt was gaining weight in the suitcase. Good to know it’s just bad packing skills!
If you took a glass of water and poured half into another cup, the amount of water doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter how you rearrange it, the volume of water is still the same.
The same is true for folding clothes. It doesn’t matter how you fold them, as long as you’re not capturing pockets of air, the material doesn’t change volume if you rearrange how it’s folded.
That said, imagine trying to fit a 3rd shoe in a shoebox. There may literally be enough volume left in the shoe box, but you are limited by the shape of the box and the shoe.
Practically, it’s the same for clothes in a suitcase. Due to the shape of the suitcase and possibly some of your other belongings, there are folding techniques that may increase your packing efficiency.
Yes absolutely. There are two reasons for this…one is air space the other is purely geometry. Rolling up a shirt creates a volumetric cylinder, when squashed it’s a volumetric rectangle. As opposed to say a fairly flat rectangle.
Flat rectangles take up more area in a suitcase…suitcases have more volume then area…which means that if you pack things that take a lot of area you’re going to run into trouble. If you optimise for volume you’re in better shape.
Rolling a shirt also makes them more visible when you open the case…where as stacked shirts hide all shirts behind the top one.
It’s more about the space that your shirts aren’t occupying.
Imagine you fill a jar with rocks, and you can fit say 20 rocks in the jar. Because rocks are weird shapes, there are little air pockets between them—places in the jar full of rock that contain no rocks.
Now imagine you take a hammer to the rocks and smash them into pebbles. If you put them back in the jar, they won’t reach the top anymore. Why? It’s still the same amount of rock, just in more tiny pieces? Well, the pebbles fit together better, so those little pockets of air are smaller.
You could take this even further and smash all the pebbles and grind them into sand. Now when you put the sand in the jar there’s even MORE SPACE between the top of the sand and the lip of the jar because the tiny sand grains fit together with less air space between them than the rocks or the pebbles had.
It’s the same idea with packing your suitcase. Some shapes fit together better and leave less empty space between them than other. Chucking all your clothes in a heap will have more empty space between items than if you neatly fold everything.
Doesn’t impact the volume, but absolutely impacts the ability to maximize available volume in the suitcase. Especially if you want to avoid wrinkles. I travel frequently for work and vastly prefer the bundle method. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–ZrYtRjYfs&ab_channel=NBCNews
Yes and no. There are ways to maximize the volume you are packing into. Using the army roll I was able to almost double the amount I could pack in a given space since it left less airspace and were more tightly packed. It’s easier to access than bundle method and also reduces wrinkles.
Latest Answers