Do you understand kW vs kWh?

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icarus62

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A Watt is a Joule per second, if I remember correctly - it's a *rate* of energy usage. Therefore a kWh is an *amount* of energy (1000 x 60 x 60 = 3,600,000 Joules).
 
volts is like water pressure. like if you point a hose straight up, how high will it go.

amps is like volume. like how wide the stream of water is.

KwH is sort of like volume times time. like how much does it take to fill a swimming pool.

what you do at home is buy a "volume" of electricity.
that's enough to run your computer and dishwasher and oven, etc, for the number of hours you use each.

maybe you have a small microwave that uses 800 watts, and takes 3 minutes to heat a cup of coffee.
or maybe you have a 1200 watt microwave that heats your cup of coffee in 2 minutes.
in either case you use 2400 Kw minutes.
 
I understand, yes.

kW is how powerful a device is, how fast it will use electricity.
kWh is how much "electrical fuel" the device used.

The equivalents in "old money" for gas were BTU (British thermal units) and cubic feet - nowadays they convert everything to the more scientific kW and kWh (for gas, they apply a "calorific multiplier" to reflect how much energy is in the gas per cubic foot)

kW is akin to the cubic capacity of a car engine, kWh is akin to litres of petrol.

There is no equivalence. You can make assumptions about how many hours you are using devices, though.

Say you replace all your 60W lightbulbs with 6W ones, you are using 1/10 of the electricity you were before, so your carbon footprint (for lighting) will be 1/10 of previous.

You can't use 35kW less in a year. You might have used 35kWh less in a year, or you might have reduced your home's requirement by 35kW.
 
Ok Ok
I get that 1000 watts is one kW.. I also get that kWs used in an hour is a kWh..
Here's where I get confused:
How do you convert kWh into kW?? Is there a formula without knowing how many hours the consumption lasted??

Also, if I want an equivalence, where could I find this??

I figured that I saved 35 kW in a year. How does that translate into carbon footprint or emission or anything else??

Any help would be useful.

Thanks!
The 35kW is a combination of homes.. Not just mine..
So, if I understood correctly: 35kW = 153 tonnes = 168 Tons of CO2

Does this sound reasonable?

Is it a good estimate that 35kW translates into 306,600,000 kW-h??

Thanks to all who respond
 
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