Missed the edit window. It’s $20/lb for dimes and quarters, and the whole thing was closer to $1200. Also, the guy whose bottle it was had started tossing only pennies in and then switched at about 5" depth to tossing all the change in.
I believe the water cooler bottle was 5 gal, so that’s $240/gal.
I also use an old glass Vlassic pickle jar I keep in the garage for all my loose change, which I dump from my wallet on my way in from the garage every day. Before the holidays each year, I take it down to the Coinstar machine and convert it into an Amazon gift card (at no cost), which is then used to start my holiday shopping for gifts. Based on my own experience, half a pickle jar nets me around $120. I’m not sure if mine is a gallon. I think it’s more like a half gallon.
I would find some appropriately sized scoop, say a half-measuring cup, but the size of the scoop doesn’t matter as long as I can use it to reach in there and pull out a representative sample of the jar’s contents. I’d take out two or three scoopfuls, and average the distribution across all of them.
Then I’d weigh the entire lot of coins and assume that the average distribution from the last stop is reasonably close to the total distribution, and calculate the total based on that.
And sometimes, typically around Christmas, they have promotions where you’ll get an extra $10 gift card if you change in at least $50.
I assume you mean filled with only pennies. I’ve never seen a Coinstar with the ‘prize guessing’ option, have to look for it…
I should have clarified that… The machine I use is not a Coinstar brand machine, but rather a machine made by another company that works the same basic way as a Coinstar. It’s called a Penny Arcade. And my coffee can is filled with all kinds of coins, in their normal distribution.
This is a good walk-through of the Penny Arcade coin guessing process.
(bolding mine)
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:nitpick: It looks like you must have had some ‘copper’ pennies mixed in with ‘zinc’ pennies if you got 172/lb. All copper pennies would be 145/lb. and all zinc pennies would be 180/lb. (using Superhal’s findings). 
What country are you in? Those don’t look anything like our $2 coins.
Quarters and dimes are different weights too, before and after 1965.
Not to mention dollars and halves too but those are much rarer.
You are correct, sir. 
ETA: Cool site (coin melt values), Superhal! Thanks for sharing! 
i have an idea … since the number of each type of coins are almost the same … you can punch a hole somewhere whose size is a tad smaller than the size of the largest coin type … … then drop those coins on that hole… all coins will go through except the largest one type … count them and you got what you want without going to coin machine
They appear to be Australian coins.
No doubt, but I’d be willing to bet that the OP’s mix of coins includes some of the older copper coins as well.
Those are Australian $2 coins, aren’t they?
Edit: Huh, sure that post wasn’t there before.
The jar I handled started collection in the late 70’s, yet had very few unclad coins. It did have a number of wheat pennies, despite the fact that the guy who filled it usually made a point to separate those out and had a small collection of them.
A wheat penny is worth about 6 cents, and not really worth hunting down. Unless it’s a 1943 S Bronze, which is worth $78K.
Answer:
Who cares, youre just going to blow it on booze anyways, after losing 10% to a Coinstar machine.
Aus coins were like that for a couple of decades following decimilation.
Separate all the copper coins from the silver. If you really want to, find any (rare) 50c pieces in the silver (therer never were any to find). Weigh the silver and copper seperately.
20c weighed twice as much as 10c weighed twice as much as 5c.
2c weighed twice as much as 1c.
50c coins are much more common now. $2 coins don’t weigh twice as much as $1 coins. 1c coins aren’t in circulation. But for a while there in the 70s, weighing the coinds was the standard that all the banks here used when you brought your coins in.
This is exactly what I do. I either get Starbucks gift cards or a gift card for the grocery store where I’m using the Coinstar. Grocery money always comes in handy.
When my stepkids were young, I’d pay them a percentage (I think it was 20%) to roll the coins for me. Coinstar is a bargain compared to that!