Converters

Unit converters for the measurements that come up in daily life: length, weight, temperature, area, volume, speed, data storage, time, power, energy and pressure. Each dimension page explains the unit system, what every unit is used for, and the exact conversion factors — most of which are definitions rather than measurements.

Tanzania uses metric units for almost everything: kilometers on the roads, hectares for land, kilograms in the market. Imperial units mostly appear on imported goods, in recipes written for the United States, and in engineering specifications. Every pair page states its multiplier in both directions and works through examples.

The conversions on these pages are definitions, not measurements, which is why they are the one part of the site with no authority to cite and nothing that goes out of date. An inch is exactly 25.4 millimetres by international agreement, a kilogram is exactly 1,000 grams, and a litre is exactly 1,000 millilitres. Temperature is the exception in form rather than in kind: Celsius and Fahrenheit are offset scales, so the conversion is a multiplication and an addition rather than a single factor, and the pair pages show that formula rather than a bare number.

Where a conversion does involve an approximation, the page says so rather than hiding it. The energy converter is the clearest case: it covers joules, calories and kilowatt-hours, and the Tanzanian reference points it uses — what a unit of electricity costs, what an appliance draws over a month — rest on TANESCO tariffs, which do change. Those figures carry their own verified date, which is a different kind of claim from the exactness of the unit factors beside them.