BTU Per Hour to Megawatts (BTU/h to MW)
1 BTU per hour equals 2.930710702×10⁻⁷ megawatts (rounded).
How to convert BTU per hour to megawatts
To convert BTU per hour to megawatts, multiply the number of BTU per hour by 2.930710702×10⁻⁷. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply megawatts by 3,412,141.633 (rounded).
megawatts = BTU per hour × 2.930710702×10⁻⁷
Example: 10 BTU per hour = 0.000002930710702 megawatts.
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
Megawatt (MW)
One million watts. Used for power plants and large industrial loads.
Million-watt figures appear wherever machines do work on an industrial scale, and the megawatt is the natural unit for them. Large electric motors, warships, data centers and some scientific equipment such as supercolliders operate at this level, and a large residential or commercial building may use several megawatts of electric power. It is not a unit with a famous inventor: it is the watt multiplied by the SI prefix mega, standing for one million.
Transport gives some vivid comparisons. Heavy diesel-electric locomotives typically produce and use 3 to 5 MW, modern high-powered electric locomotives peak at 5 or 6 MW, and the Eurostar e300 uses more than 12 MW. Power stations add a notation of their own: MWe refers to the electrical output of a generator, while MWt refers to thermal output. Argentina's Embalse plant, for example, generates 2,109 MWt of heat, which drives a turbine producing 648 MWe of electricity.
1 megawatt = 1,000,000 watts (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Watt (megawatt section); Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power)
Related conversions
- Megawatts to BTU per hour (reverse)
- BTU per hour to watts
- BTU per hour to kilowatts
- BTU per hour to horsepower
- BTU per hour to gigawatts
- BTU per hour to metric horsepower
- Watts to megawatts
- Kilowatts to megawatts
- Horsepower to megawatts
- Gigawatts to megawatts
- Metric horsepower to megawatts
See all power units.