BTU Per Hour to Kilowatts (BTU/h to kW)
1 BTU per hour equals 0.0002930710702 kilowatts (rounded).
How to convert BTU per hour to kilowatts
To convert BTU per hour to kilowatts, multiply the number of BTU per hour by 0.0002930710702. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilowatts by 3,412.141633 (rounded).
kilowatts = BTU per hour × 0.0002930710702
Example: 10 BTU per hour = 0.002930710702 kilowatts.
Several different horsepower units exist. This site lists mechanical (745.7 W), metric (735.5 W) and electrical (746 W) horsepower separately.
About these units
BTU Per Hour (BTU/h)
About 0.293 watts. The rating of air conditioners, furnaces and heaters in the US.
Btu per hour inherits its history from the British thermal unit, which a 1942 note in the journal Nature said apparently originated in the United States and was later adopted in Great Britain. The Btu was defined as the heat needed to raise one pound of liquid water by one degree Fahrenheit at a constant pressure of one atmosphere. Because water's heat capacity varies slightly with temperature, several versions exist, differing by up to 0.5 percent, so the unit has never been quite as tidy as the joule.
Dividing it by time gives a power unit used mainly in North America for heating and cooling equipment, and in the UK mostly for air conditioning. One watt is about 3.412 Btu/h, and one horsepower is about 2,544 Btu/h. Thousands of Btu per hour are often written MBH. Air conditioning capacity is often given in tons, where one ton of cooling is 12,000 Btu/h, about 3.52 kW, the rate needed to freeze one short ton of water into ice in 24 hours.
1 BTU per hour = 0.2930710702 watts (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: British thermal unit; Wikipedia: Watt
Kilowatt (kW)
1,000 watts. Used for the power of motors, cars and household appliances.
A kilowatt is simply the watt with the SI prefix kilo, meaning a thousand, attached. The watt was adopted into the SI in 1960 and is small next to machinery, since an incandescent night light uses about 4 W, so the thousand-watt multiple suits engines, electric motors, tools and heaters. For readers used to older units, one kilowatt is roughly 1.34 horsepower.
Small electric heaters with a single element can use about 1 kW, and a domestic electric kettle or microwave oven draws a similar amount. The average household in the United States uses about 1 kW of electric power over time. On a clear midday near the equator, a square meter of Earth's surface receives about 1 kW of sunlight. Do not confuse the kilowatt with the kilowatt-hour on an electricity bill: the first is a rate, the second is the energy used by running one kilowatt for an hour, which equals 3,600,000 watt-seconds.
1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Kilowatt; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power); BIPM: SI prefixes
Related conversions
- Kilowatts to BTU per hour (reverse)
- BTU per hour to watts
- BTU per hour to horsepower
- BTU per hour to megawatts
- BTU per hour to gigawatts
- BTU per hour to metric horsepower
- Watts to kilowatts
- Horsepower to kilowatts
- Megawatts to kilowatts
- Gigawatts to kilowatts
- Metric horsepower to kilowatts
- Milliwatts to kilowatts
- Electrical horsepower to kilowatts
- Foot-pounds per second to kilowatts
- Tons of refrigeration to kilowatts
- Kilocalories per hour to kilowatts
- Calories per second to kilowatts
- Ergs per second to kilowatts
See all power units.