To understand power, there's a few things I always tell people. 1. What context are you referring to power in? Are you analyzing the power at an instantaneous point in time or are you designing a system that can provide a certain amount of power? 2. You need to understand ohms law and a variation of ohms law V=IR (voltage = current*resistance) P=IV To entertain your analogy above: Your squirt gun - Voltage: analogous to pressure / This is variable - You pump your squirt gun as much as you want (100psi) Resistance: analogous to resistance caused by nozzle size / this is constant - you can't change the nozzle size, it is what it is. Current: analogous to flow / This is a dependent variable - it will be a byproduct of the two items above When you are calculating power, the hidden variable is Resistance. Voltage was variable (100psi is what you decided on) and the resistance was fixed - your current ends up being whatever the heck it needs to be. So when you calculate power (which is an instantaneous measurement), you are multiplying Voltage and Current - and the Current was whatever the heck it needed to be. In this example, we analyzed the power at an instantaneous point in time. Where this analogy gets tricky is, the squirt gun and the firehose are two systems designed to provide different amounts of power. Hope this helps

Almost correct. In this water analogy (* are my thoughts): * Voltage (Volts, V) is indeed pressure (Pascals, Pa) - the potential to move energy/water. * But what about static vs dynamic water pressure? * Current (Amps, A) is the diameter of the pipe (Meters, m). * But why not the flow itself? * Power (Watts, W) is water that is flowing (Liters per second, L/s) - higher pressure and/or a bigger pipe gives more flow. * But why not leave it as power (it's a universal concept)? * Resistance (Ohms, Ω) is the resistance of the pipe (clogs, material, length?). * But how is that different from the diameter of the pipe? * ... the more analogies you try to draw, the more confusing it becomes! The water analogy may be useful for explaining electricity to small kids, but that's it. It doesn't really go beyond explaining V=IR in a clumsy way. I think it's better to ditch this analogy as soon as possible and maybe even not to learn it in the first place. At some point, you'll be stuck trying to understand electromagnetic phenomena that don't have water analogies (or if they do, they're not easy/intuitive either), like electromagnetic fields, inductance, charge, alternating current, etc. There are also hydraulic phenomena that don't apply to electricity, like dynamic vs static pressure, turbulence, hydraulic transients (water hammer), etc.