KWh is a measure of total energy, not instantaneous power. Your watt meter was saying that since last reset of the value it measured 40 KWh of energy use. That's not an insignificant amount - a Chevy Bolt can go around 180 miles on 40KWh. Watts, or kilowatts, are instantaneous power. That same Bolt can easily pull 100KW while accelerating and if it could somehow do that for an hour, it would have used 100KWh. It could never make it the whole hour as it has a 65KWh battery, so it would run out after 39 minutes.

[–] bob_lemon@feddit.de 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What you're describing is kWh, not kW/h. You need to multiply power with time to get back to energy. An appliance using 1kW of power for 1h "uses" 1kWh of energy. The same appliance running for 2h requires 2kWh instead.

kW/h doesn't really make sense as a unit, although it could technically describe the rate at which energy consumption changes over time.

[–] sploosh@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Autocorrect seems to disagree, but autocorrect doesn't know shit about power vs energy. Fixed it.