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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out if you're joking or not. BTU = British Thermal Unit and is pretty much the standard measure used around the world when talking about energy use associated with heating. It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, regardless of where you find yourself in the world...

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While only one data point, in Germany BTU is very uncommon. Energy used for heating is expressed as kWh, same as with electricity.

BTUs are used a lot in Canada, but Canada only made about 9 years of progress toward metrification between 1976 and 1985, I was still in high school when our Metric Commission was abolished along with most legal requirements to use metric units, while still retaining them.

Maybe it's generational (I'm GenX), so I'm not sure if all Canadians muddle through both systems as much as I do but I seem to live in a constant superposition state between Metric and Imperial, with little sense about which I'll use for any particular purpose.

I use Celsius for cooking and low temperatures, but Fahrenheit for body temperature and most room temperatures; kilometres for long distances but inches and feet for height and most short distances; pounds for body weight, but never ounces (for that I use grams), for cooking and large weights I seem to mostly use metric units. Volumes are almost exclusively metric, I suspect because we also went through a transition when gallons shrunk from Imperial (4.54609 litres) to US gallons (3.785 litres).

I envy European consistency when it comes to metric.

Imperial is mostly for measurements related to the body, (temperature, height/length, weight), presumably due to the amount of people who grew up with it and it's ubiquity in the American media. Pretty much every other aspect of those measurements not related to the body are done in Metric (It's -10c out, my yogurt is 750g, and it's about 5km to the store). Most room temperatures are in Celsius, or have dual options, and those that aren't are typically because we heavily use American made thermostats due to our trade connections, or it's an older model. Almost everything else uses Metric except for small exceptions like Construction which is again due to long/common use and trading with America. Everything with scientists/doctors is Metric.

As an additional data point, BTU isn't used in Britain very much these days. As with germany, kilowatt-hour is the preferred unit of (heating) energy.

Um, I should have elaborated in my original post - it most definitely is still heavily used in the UK by, for example, architects when evaluating how much heating a house will need. My original post wasn't terribly clear about that, my bad... Yes, consumer-facing information these days is indeed more likely to be expressed in kilowatt-hours...

I built a BTU-measuring device for a british customer, and he explained they had been using the metric system since the 70's.

"It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit"

Now, presume there is no gauge at hand to measure a pound less a thermometer to measure fahrenheits. Often outside of commonwealth territories and US we use SI :)

OK, I'm going to get grumpy here, sorry about that. Your comment is a perfect demonstration of middlebrow criticism, and adds exactly zero to the discussion.

Firstly, I'm Australian. We use SI measurements - your comment is not just smug, but wrong.

Secondly, are you honestly postulating that people understand the underlying reality of what a kilowatt hour actually means? That they have a "gauge" that can measure kilowatts? Of course they don't, and for that matter most people that use BTUs don't really understand what they represent either. They just know that it's a measurement of energy-use. All they really want is something that allows them to compare two options, and frankly, the units matter not at all.

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