Have you ever heard refrigerated air conditioning El Paso techs toss around the acronym BTU? Perhaps at the time you wondered what a BTU was but didn’t ask them to explain for fear of looking silly. Well, fear no more. There is nothing silly about wanting to learn more about your home’s refrigerated air conditioning system and we’re here to explain:
In the early years, a cooling system’s power was defined by the weight of the ice blocks used to keep it going. Sounds incredibly simple right? Well, it was simple until refrigerated coolant was introduced into the mix. When that happened, cooling system manufacturers had to find another way to communicate the power of a particular system to interested buyers. So, they decided to us the acronym BTU. It stands for British thermal unit. Of course that brings us as to why they decided to choose that particular term over all others.
Remember how we said that the common measurement up to that point had been the weight of ice blocks? Well at the time, BTUs were used to describe how much effort was needed to change the temperature of water up or down by an agreed upon number of degrees. So since the air conditioning manufacturers were dealing with temperature and refrigerant, it just seemed logical to adopt the BTU.
Nowadays, it is so widely accepted that most refrigerated air conditioning buyers rarely think about the term’s origins. Of course as air conditioning specialists, we like to think about it now and again. We also like to help homeowner’s calculate how much BTUs their home’s system has and determine whether or not it is enough to cool the home efficiently. To learn a great deal more about BTUs and other ways refrigerated air conditioning techs measure a system’s worth, please contact us at El Paso SoBellas Home Services today.
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125 Graphite Dr. Ste. D
El Paso, TX 79932
915-585-2811