What is a Joule?
A. The joule is defined as a unit of energy used to measure the distance a given weight can be moved in a unit of time or the amount of heat produced in a resistor by electrical current. The joule is commonly described as one watt second. The joule does not measure the effectiveness or safety of electric shock.
Note: Outside of the U.S. and some other places, BTUs is being replaced with the SI unit of energy, the Joule. (J). The English have beaten out the Scots by James Prescott Joule who defined this value. since there are 3600 seconds in an hour) the following formulas equating Watts, Joules, and Newton meters can be written: 1 Watt second (Ws) = 1 joule (J) = 1 newton meter 1 Watt hour (Wh) = 3600 Joules 1 kilowatt hour = 3.6 x 106 Joules, since there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. We can think of an air conditioner’s “efficiency” as expressed either in the total operating cost for a season of use, or you may prefer to just express the air conditioner’s efficiency as its operating cost to run the system for one hour. The equation shown at page top is designed to reduce all of the parameters describing air conditioning efficiency to a single efficiency number, SEER. SEER numbers are useful when we’re comparing one air conditioner with another. But suppose we want to know the actual air cond
