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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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like a woman I know who talked about the need to ban gas stoves for the environment while a handyman was installing her new 50kBTU outdoor propane patio heater which feeds from the same tank as her removed gas stove.

Some people are so lacking in understanding that they don't even know when they're using the wrong units.

Using "BTU" to mean "BTU per hour" is the accepted terminology for natural-gas- and propane-powered appliances in the US.

Stupid, but industry-standard.

Wrong unit? Her old gas stove did have the correct propane jets, if that's what you mean.

BTU is a unit of energy. The relevant parameter for engines or other energy-conversion devices is power, energy per unit time. Some quick googling indicates that the convention in the patio heater business is to quote BTU ratings with an implied "per hour", so a 50kBTU patio heater outputs 50,000 BTU per hour (for anyone still wondering what the hell that means, 50,000 BTU is about 2 liters of liquified propane).

This sounds pedantic, but this implied unit convention is far from universal. In some industries, the "BTU value" of something has implied units of energy-per-unit-volume or energy-per-unit-weight. I had enough context in your example to know that there was an implied "per unit time" involved, but I didn't know immediately if it was per second, per minute, per hour, or per day.

Hourly btu is a standard unit of measure everywhere. Air conditioners are always listed as some multiple of "12,000BTU" all over the world.

For reference, a gas range will also be about 50kBTU (per hour), if you turn all the burners on including the oven burners.

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