Foot-pounds Per Second to Kilowatts (ft⋅lbf/s to kW)
1 foot-pound per second equals 0.001355817948 kilowatts (rounded).
How to convert foot-pounds per second to kilowatts
To convert foot-pounds per second to kilowatts, multiply the number of foot-pounds per second by 0.001355817948. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilowatts by 737.5621493 (rounded).
kilowatts = foot-pounds per second × 0.001355817948
Example: 10 foot-pounds per second = 0.01355817948 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
Foot-pound Per Second (ft⋅lbf/s)
About 1.3558 watts. A horsepower is 550 of these.
Engineers in the English-speaking world measured work as force times distance, so a pound-force lifted through a foot became a foot-pound, and doing it each second gave the foot-pound per second. It is the base from which horsepower is built, since the imperial horsepower is defined as 550 foot-pounds per second, or 33,000 per minute, the figure fixed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton in 1783.
In SI terms one foot-pound per second is about 1.3558 watts, and NIST lists 1.355818 watts without marking it exact. The reverse is 1 watt equal to 0.7375621 foot-pounds per second. Multiplying 550 by 1.3558 gives about 745.7 watts, the usual value for a mechanical horsepower. The unit is rarely quoted on its own today, though it appears in older mechanics texts and in small-scale power estimates.
1 foot-pound per second = 1.355817948 watts (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Horsepower; Wikipedia: Watt; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8
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 foot-pounds per second (reverse)
- Foot-pounds per second to watts
- Foot-pounds per second to horsepower
- Watts to kilowatts
- Horsepower to kilowatts
- Megawatts to kilowatts
- Gigawatts to kilowatts
- Metric horsepower to kilowatts
- BTU per hour to kilowatts
- Milliwatts to kilowatts
- Electrical horsepower 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.