Kilowatt Hours

The more extensively you read and study about the generation and consumption of energy, the more often you'll encounter the three little letters KWH. Just what do they stand for and why are they so important?

KWH is the abbreviation for kilowatt hours, which is a vital unit of measurement in the technical jargon of energy. Although the kilowatt measurement isn't used in the International System of Units, it is most often used on your household electric meter, meaning that home electric meters are probably kilowatt hour meters. Why is this important? Since your meter is actually a kilowatt hour calculator that monitors your energy consumption, you have a reference point for considering and calculating your kWh usage.

First, let's cover some kilowatt hours basics. We can do this be gaining a fundamental understanding of the language and terminology that we're employing. A kilowatt hour is a measure of energy that equals one thousand watt-hours. Wait, you say, what are watts?

Watts, simply put, are the measurement of energy usage at a given moment, kind of like a snapshot. Your central air conditioning unit is probably using (or “pulling”) over three thousand watts while running. Here's a very familiar example of watts as a measurement: light bulbs. If the incandescent light bulb in your desk lamp is rated at sixty watts, then the amount of energy the lamp is using when it is on is sixty watts.

In order to calculate the watt-hour of an electrical device, we simply need to know how much wattage it uses in the space of an hour. For instance, that sixty watt light bulb, running for an hour is sixty watt hours. If the lamp is on for eight hours throughout the day you're looking at 480 watt hours (60wh x 8 hours = 480wh). See, it's quite simple.

Now it is easy to calculate kWh usage since kWh meters are dealing with our basic watts measurement, just multiplied by one thousand.

Then how much is 1 kWh? That's right; it is one thousand kilowatt hours. And knowing this, we can make much more sense of the use of a kWh calculator that can tell us the heat pump kWh usage in our geothermal system, or the kWh usage of an unoccupied house. Now we can calculate kWh of all of our devices, which can lead us to discovering the average daily kWh use in our home or business.

Once we grasp the terminology, we can all have a point of reference when discussing the use, generation, and saving of energy.