Energy converter

kWh to J — convert kilowatt-hours to joules

1kWh3,600,000J

Exact 1 × 3,600,000 = 3,600,000

Convert joules, calories, kilowatt-hours and BTU — with the food Calorie and the physics calorie kept a thousand apart.

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Read the energy unit guide — what each one is, where it came from, and which of them are quietly different from each other.

Questions

Is a food Calorie the same as a calorie?

No — it is a thousand of them. The Calorie on a nutrition label is a kilocalorie, written with a capital C in principle and almost never in practice. A 250 Calorie chocolate bar holds 250,000 physics calories, or about 1,046 kilojoules, which is why European labels quote kJ alongside.

What does a kilowatt-hour actually represent?

One kilowatt drawn for one hour — a 1,000 W heater running for sixty minutes, or a 100 W bulb for ten hours. It is the unit your electricity bill is priced in, and it equals exactly 3.6 million joules.

How much energy is one BTU?

Roughly the heat needed to raise one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit — about 1,055 joules, or the energy in a single kitchen match. Air conditioners are rated in BTU per hour, where a 12,000 BTU/h unit is one "ton" of cooling and draws around 3.5 kW of heat.

Why is the electronvolt so small?

Because it is sized for single particles: it is the energy one electron picks up crossing a one-volt potential difference. At about 1.6 × 10⁻¹⁹ joules it would be absurd for anything larger, which is precisely why particle physics uses it instead of dragging around twenty leading zeros.

All energy units and their conversion factors

Unit Symbol In joules
Joules J 1
Kilojoules kJ 1,000
Megajoules MJ 1,000,000
Watt-hours Wh 3,600
Kilowatt-hours kWh 3,600,000
Calories cal 4.184
Kilocalories kcal 4,184
British thermal units BTU 1,055.06
Therms thm 105,505,585.26
Foot-pounds ft·lbf 1.355818
Electronvolts eV 1.6022e-19