Convert watt to kilowatt

What is a watt?

Watt is a metric for power evaluation. It got its name after the eponymous physicist, who devoted his time and effort to this area of science. Before the introduction of this option in the late XIX century, for this purpose, horsepower was utilized. Interestingly, it was designed by the same scientist. Still, later the standard system switched to watts.

Modern watt (W) has a meaning of power at which the 1-Joule work is performed during one second. The common abbreviation is W. Many derivatives with common prefixes like kilo- and giga- are utilized in practice.

The evaluation of power in these terms serves as a key characteristic of devices that run on thermal or electrical energy. You can easily find watts on the packaging of the device, which gives the general understanding of its capacity. Thus, everything that is related to thermal or electrical power can be described using this metric.

What is a kilowatt?

Watts were introduced in general practice at the end of the XIC century and replaced the horsepower that was utilized for the same purpose. Nowadays, this metric is the basic for the evaluation of mechanical, electrical and thermal power and corresponds to the work of 1 Joule performed during one second.

As modern devices are often large and quite productive, they have a very large amount of power, for which 8-digit and sometimes 10-digit numbers are needed. To make the designations and calculations more convenient, different derived quantities were introduced, for instance, kilowatts (kW).

One kilowatt corresponds to 1000 watts. Numerous devices are labelled with Kilowatts as a more common option. In order to transform the given number into usual watts, one needs just to multiply by 1000.

Hectowatts and terawatts are also utilized to denote large quantities. For the smaller options, microWatt, nanoWatt, picoWatt are used.