this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Because people have an intuitive feeling about how much 1 kW is, because they use devices with a power rating in Watt and have a feel for how powerful a device is at what rating. People also know exactly what an hour is. So it makes sense to think about a device of 1kW running for 1 hour, people have a good sense of how much energy that is in daily use. Since most energy bills are also in terms of kWh, people also have a good sense about the costs of that energy.
Given the popularity of the unit, I think people like it, otherwise a different unit would have been used already.
Yeah i haven't dealt with joules on a regular basis since college. They may as well be coulombs to my instinctive understanding
Right, so it's only the popularity of the unit. If everyone would use MJ that's what people would be used to and there'd be no real difference.