Why are Watt Hours not Watts per Hour? Are they the same thing?
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“Watts” are a name we gave to a unit of “energy per second”, it’s not an amount of energy, it’s an expression of how fast you’re using it. So saying “energy per second per hour” doesn’t really mean anything useful. That would be like saying “miles per hour per hour” for driving a car.
But if you drive 60 miles per hour for 1 hour, you will have gone 60 miles. In the same way, if you use 1 Watt (1 energy per second) for 1 hour, you will have used 1 Watt-hour (or 3,600 energy, which we call “Joules”).
To put it another way, you’re multiplying a *rate* (Watts) by a *time* (hours) to get an *amount* (Watt-hours, or Joules). That’s not the same as dividing a rate by a time, which doesn’t really give you anything meaningful.
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