BTU Per Hour to Metric Horsepower (BTU/h to PS)
1 BTU per hour equals 0.0003984657624 metric horsepower (rounded).
How to convert BTU per hour to metric horsepower
To convert BTU per hour to metric horsepower, multiply the number of BTU per hour by 0.0003984657624. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply metric horsepower by 2,509.625906 (rounded).
metric horsepower = BTU per hour × 0.0003984657624
Example: 10 BTU per hour = 0.003984657624 metric horsepower.
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
Metric Horsepower (PS)
Exactly 735.49875 watts, the power to lift 75 kilograms by one meter in one second. Called PS, CV or pk and used for car engines in Europe and Asia.
Continental Europe built its own horsepower on kilograms and meters instead of pounds and feet. The metric horsepower, written PS from the German Pferdestarke, is the power needed to lift 75 kilograms by one meter in one second, or 75 kilogram-force meters per second. The German standard DIN 66036 gives its value as 735.49875 W, about 98.6 percent of the imperial horsepower. It goes by many local names, among them cv in Italian and Portuguese, pk in Dutch, ch in French and hk in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
It had a French predecessor in the poncelet, a 19th-century unit based on 100 kgf-m/s. In 1972 the European Economic Community replaced PS with the kilowatt as its official unit for power, yet car brochures in many countries still quote PS or its cousins alongside kilowatts. When comparing a European car with an American one, remember that the two horsepowers differ by about 1.4 percent.
1 metric horsepower = 735.49875 watts (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Metric horsepower; Wikipedia: Horsepower
Related conversions
- Metric horsepower to BTU per hour (reverse)
- BTU per hour to watts
- BTU per hour to kilowatts
- BTU per hour to horsepower
- BTU per hour to megawatts
- BTU per hour to gigawatts
- Watts to metric horsepower
- Kilowatts to metric horsepower
- Horsepower to metric horsepower
- Megawatts to metric horsepower
- Gigawatts to metric horsepower
See all power units.