watt-hour: Definition from Answers.com

"KWH" redirects here. For other uses, see KWH (disambiguation).

Residential electric power meter located in United States.

The kilowatt hour, or kilowatt-hour, (symbol kW·h, kWh) is a unit of energy equal to 3,600,000 joules.^[1]^[2]

Energy in watt hours is the multiplication of power in watts and time in hours.

The most common use of the unit is when energy is delivered by electric utilities to consumers. In this case electricity use is usually billed in kilowatt hours (kW·h, W h): 1 kW·h = 1000 W·h.

1 Definition
2 Examples
3 Symbol and abbreviation for kilowatt hour
4 Conversions
5 Watt hour multiples
6 Other energy-related units
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

Definition

The standard unit of energy in the International System of Units (SI) is the joule (J), equal to one watt second. Inversely, one watt is equal to 1 J/s. One kilowatt hour is 3.6 megajoules, which is the amount of energy expended (or dissipated) if work is done at a constant rate of one thousand watts for one hour.

Examples

A heater, rated at 1000 watts (1 kilowatt), operating for one hour uses one kilowatt hour (equivalent to 3600 kilojoules) of energy.

Using a 60 watt light bulb for one hour consumes 0.06 kilowatt hours of electricity. Using a 60 watt light bulb for one thousand hours consumes 60 kilowatt hours of electricity.

If a 100 watt light bulb is on for one hour per day for 30 days, the energy used is

100 W × 30 h = 3000 W·h = 3 kW·h or 10.8 million joules.

Symbol and abbreviation for kilowatt hour

The brochure for SI^[3] and a voluntary standard^[4] issued jointly by an international (IEEE) and national (ASTM) organization state that when compound unit symbols are formed by multiplication, the individual symbols should be separated by a half-high dot or a space (for example, "kW·h" or "kW h"). However, at least one major usage guide^[5] and the IEEE/ASTM standard allow kWh (but do not mention other multiples of the watt hour). One guide published by NIST specifically recommends avoiding "kWh" "to avoid possible confusion".^[6] Nonetheless, it is commonly used in commercial, educational, scientific and media publications.^[7]

Conversions

To convert a quantity measured in a unit in the left column to the units in the top row, multiply by the factor in the cell where the row and column intersect.

	joule	watt hour	electronvolt	calorie
1 J = 1 kg m² s^-2 =	1	2.778 × 10⁻⁴	6.241 × 10¹⁸	0.239
1 W·h =	3600	1	2.247 × 10²²	859.8
1 eV =	1.602 × 10⁻¹⁹	4.45 × 10⁻²³	1	3.827 × 10⁻²⁰
1 cal =	4.1868	1.163 × 10⁻³	2.613 × 10¹⁹	1

Watt hour multiples

The kilowatt hour is commonly used by electrical distribution providers for purposes of billing, since the monthly energy consumption of a typical residential customer ranges from a few to several hundred kilowatt hours. Megawatt hours, gigawatt hours, and terawatt hours are often used for metering larger amounts of electrical energy to industrial customers and in power generation.

SI multiples for watt hour (W·h)
Submultiples			Multiples
Value	Symbol	Name	Value	Symbol	Name
10^-3	mW·h	milliwatt hour	10³	kW·h	kilowatt hour
			10⁶	MW·h	megawatt hour
			10⁹	GW·h	gigawatt hour
			10¹²	TW·h	terawatt hour
			10¹⁵	PW·h	petawatt hour

Other energy-related units

Several other units are commonly used to indicate power or energy capacity or use in specific application areas.

Average annual power production or consumption can be expressed in kilowatt hours per year; for example, when comparing the energy efficiency of household appliances whose power consumption varies with time or the season of the year, or the energy produced by a distributed power source. One kilowatt hour per year equals about 114.08 milliwatts applied constantly during one year.

The energy capacity of a battery is usually expressed indirectly in ampere hours; to convert watt hours (W·h) to ampere hour (A·h), the watt hour value must be divided by the voltage of the power source. This value is approximate since the voltage is not constant during discharge of a battery.^[8]

The Board of Trade unit (B.O.T.U.) is an obsolete UK synonym for kilowatt hour. The term derives from the name of the Board of Trade that regulated the electricity industry. The B.O.T.U. should not be confused with the British thermal unit or BTU, which is a much smaller quantity of thermal energy. To further the confusion, at least as late as 1937, Board of Trade unit was simply abbreviated ″B.T.U.″ or ″BTU.″

Burnup of nuclear fuel is normally quoted in megawatt-days per tonne (MWd/MTU), where tonne refers to a metric ton of uranium metal or its equivalent, and megawatt refers to the entire thermal output, not the fraction which is converted to electricity.

References

^ Taylor, Barry N. (1995). Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) (Special publication 811). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology. 31.
^ "Half-high dots or spaces are used to express a derived unit formed from two or more other units by multiplication." Barry N. Taylor. (2001 ed.) The International System of Units. (Special publication 330). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology. 20
^ The International System of Units (SI). (2006, 8th ed.) Paris: International Bureau of Weights and Measures. 130.
^ Standard for the Use of the International System of Units (SI): The Modern Metric System. (1997). (IEEE/ASTM SI 10-1997). New York and West Conshohocken, PA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and ASTM. 15.
^ Chicago Manual of Style. (14th ed., 1993) University of Chicago Press. 482.
^ Taylor, Barry N. (1995). 13
^ See for example: Wind Energy Reference Manual Part 2: Energy and Power Definitions Danish Wind Energy Association. Retrieved 9 January 2008; "Kilowatt-Hour (kWh)" BusinessDictionary.com. Retrieved 9 January 2008; "US Nuclear Power Industry" www.world-nuclear.org. Retrieved 9 January 2008; "Energy. A Beginners Guide: Making Sense of Units" Renew On Line (UK). The Open University. Retrieved 9 January 2008.
^ "Ah (ampere-hour) to Wh (watt-hour) conversion" BatteryHippo.com, 2008, webpage: BatteryHippo.com.

External links

Power and Energy in the Home: The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed an applet which illustrates the consumption and cost of energy in the home, and allows the user to see the effects of manipulating the flow of electricity to various household appliances.
Battery Capacity: ampere hour to watt hour conversion
Prices per kilowatt hour in the USA, Energy Information Administration

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Result:

	WH (abbreviation)
	W-hr (abbreviation)
	electricity meter

watt-hour

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