BTU per hour to Megawatts Converter

One BTU per hour is exactly 0.29307107017222 watts, because one BTU is exactly 1,055.05585262 joules and an hour holds 3,600 seconds. The symbol is BTU/h.

Air conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces and chillers are rated in BTU per hour, and the figure on a room air conditioner describes its cooling capacity. Heating and cooling engineering uses the same unit for equipment sizing.

BTU per hour measures a rate, so it must be multiplied by a duration to produce an energy amount. Converting it to watts uses the exact factor, and 12,000 BTU per hour works out to about 3.5 kilowatts.

Treating BTU per hour as a unit of energy is a common error, since the same letters without the time element name an amount. A capacity rating and a consumption figure are therefore different quantities.

Cooling and heating capacities are quoted in BTU per hour, the electrical draw of the same equipment is quoted in kilowatts, and its motor may be quoted in horsepower. Choosing the wrong sibling changes the number by a factor of more than three.

A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts, or one million watts, and it carries the symbol MW. Power at this scale is quoted in megawatts because a figure in kilowatts would run to several digits.

Grid-scale generating stations, industrial plants, large data centres and utility-scale solar farms are described in megawatts of capacity. Transmission and distribution planning also uses the unit for load forecasts.

A megawatt measures capacity, which is a rate, while a megawatt-hour measures delivered energy. One megawatt sustained for one hour therefore equals one megawatt-hour, or 3.6 gigajoules.

Reporting a plant's output as megawatts when the figure is megawatt-hours confuses capacity with production. The two differ by the operating time, so a megawatt figure alone says nothing about how much energy was generated.

Megawatts describe capacity at grid and industrial scale, while kilowatts describe the appliances and generators on the same site. The unit is also mistaken for the megawatt-hour, which is a sibling in the energy dimension; capacity and delivered energy are not the same figure.