Why are Watt Hours not Watts per Hour? Are they the same thing?
In: 1289
A watt is already a rate, it’s one joule per second. A watt-hour is one watt *times* one hour, or one watt for one hour, or 3600 joules.
Imagine an alternate universe where instead of measuring distance in miles and speed in miles per hour, we just had a unit of speed, let’s call it steve. In your car, you have a speedometer that measures your speed in steve, so very slow might be 10 steve, but very fast might be 100 steve.
If you got in your car and drove at 50 steve for one hour, how far would you have gone? In this alternate universe we don’t have a unit of distance, so we’ll say that you went 50 steve-hours. And if you turned around and went back but only went as fast as 5 steve, it would take 10 hours to go the same 50 steve-hours of distance.
That’s how watts work. Watts are energy over time, watt-hours are energy.
Latest Answers