Convert BTU per Hour to Horsepower

About converting BTU per Hour to Horsepower

BTU per Hour (BTU/h) and Horsepower (hp) are both units of power, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your BTU per Hour figure by 0.000393. Ten BTU per Hour comes to 0.00393 Horsepower, and a hundred works out at 0.0393 Horsepower.

Rule of thumb: going from BTU per Hour to Horsepower divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 2,544.43 BTU per Hour to make a single Horsepower. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a BTU per Hour?

BTU per hour is the unit American heating and cooling equipment is sized in: furnaces, boilers, air conditioners and heat pumps all carry a BTU/h rating. It is a rate of heat flow — genuinely a power, in the same family as the watt — but the "per hour" is dropped so routinely in advertising that a "12,000 BTU air conditioner" reads as normal, which quietly confuses a quantity of energy with a rate of delivering it. It also inherits the BTU’s vagueness: several BTU definitions exist and differ by a fraction of a percent, so any conversion here rests on one chosen convention.

What is a Horsepower?

Horsepower is a marketing unit that became a standard. James Watt devised it to sell steam engines to mine owners who had never bought an engine but had bought plenty of horses: by measuring what a draught horse could actually lift over a working day, he could quote an engine as worth so many horses and let the buyer do the arithmetic. Mechanical or imperial horsepower is defined as exactly 550 foot-pounds-force per second, which is why it lands on no tidy figure in watts. Two and a half centuries after the horses left, it is still how cars, outboards and lawn tractors are advertised.

To put both in perspective: a window air conditioner is usually 5,000 to 12,000 BTU per hour, while a family hatchback makes something like 120 horsepower.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Horsepower to BTU per Hour converter, or browse all Power converters.