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Electrical Watts to BTU Conversion

If you study physics, or electrical engineering, or just want to plug in a lot of devices to your wall outlet without blowing the circuit breaker, then you'll need to know about power and energy units, and how to convert between them. A watt is a unit of power, which is energy per unit time. A BTU is a unit of energy. If you know the wattage of an electrical device, you can calculate how many BTUs it will use in any given amount of time.

BTUs
- BTU is an abbreviation for British thermal unit. It's the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. This would be a useful way to express energy, if scientists regularly measured things in terms of pounds or degrees Fahrenheit, but they don't. Most of the world outside the United States, including Britain, has embraced the metric system, so measurements based on pounds and Fahrenheit are often not as useful as measurements based on grams and degrees Celsius.
Calories
- A calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius, and is the metric counterpart to a BTU, based on raising a standard mass of water by a single degree in that measurement system. Another unit of energy, based on other metric measurements is the joule.
Joules
- A joule is the amount of energy required to exert one newton of force through a distance of one meter. Joules, calories and BTUs are all units of energy and can be directly converted to one another. One BTU is equal to 252 calories, or 1,055 joules.
Watts
- A watt is a unit of power, not energy. It's equivalent to one joule per second. One joule equals 1/1055, or 0.000948, BTUs. If a device operates at 1000 watts, then it uses 1000 joules each second. Expressed in terms of BTUs, that's 0.948 BTUs per second.

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