Watt

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Watt Mean?

Watt (W) is the common unit of electrical energy used in the United States. A watt is defined as a joule (unit of energy) per second and is the common standard for analysis of power consumption in U.S. residential or business systems, or in any other kind of electrical setup.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Watt

In the United States, residential energy systems are typically evaluated in terms of “kilowatt hours.” Customers are billed in terms of kilowatt hours, which is the unit of measurement for a power use of 1000 W for the time frame of 1 hour. Converting watts or kilowatts into watt hours or kilowatt hours involves looking at the static use of a certain appliance with a given wattage. For example, ten 100-W light bulbs used consecutively for 1 hour will generate 1 kWh of collective use.

As with data use, larger and larger units of measurement apply to the collective analysis of electrical systems. In addition to the kilowatt, which represents 1000 W, terms like megawatt, gigawatt and terawatt are used for metering much larger amounts of electricity.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.