Getting different units of measurements mixed up – whether in day-to-day life such as when following a recipe, or in industrial or engineering contexts – can have catastrophic results.
Such mistakes can bring about safety risks that could otherwise have been avoided. They can also have major financial consequences, and may even lead to loss of life:
- Certainly, healthcare professionals will be able to tell you about the critical importance of not confusing units like micrograms and milligrams when there is a need to measure and administer medication dosages. Any underdoses or overdoses could have severe health effects or even lead to death.
- Disastrous consequences can also arise for space missions if measurements aren’t accurate. It was a metric-imperial blunder, for example, that doomed NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999.
- However, of particular relevance if you’re reading this as an engineering or industrial professional, is the potential for inaccurate measurements to result in safety hazards, defective products, and/or outright equipment failures.
So, you can probably begin to see why remembering to convert different units of measurements can be so critically important.
When it comes to industrial design and engineering projects, even in “better-case” scenarios where no one’s life is put at risk, mistakes with conversions (or forgetting to convert units at all) could still leave you with components that are the wrong size for the given project.
This would mean you having to scrap parts and order new ones – a waste of time and budget you would be happy not to suffer.
So, You Know Converting Units Is Important – But How Can You Make It Easier?
Even if you’re relatively confident and skilled in carrying out unit conversions manually with a pen and paper, it is hardly a very efficient process in the time-pressed 2020s. That’s even if you don’t make any errors with the conversions that slow you down still further.
You can probably sense where we’re going here. All manner of tools are available online – frequently for free – that enable you to carry out fast, painless, and accurate unit conversions.
Examples of these include:
- Length conversion calculators that allow you to convert between inches, millimetres, and other units of length
- Weight conversion calculators for converting between such units as pounds, ounces, grams, kilograms, and micrograms
- Temperature conversion calculators that mean you’ll never again need to be unsure what a particular temperature is in Celsius (C), Fahrenheit (F), or Kelvin (K)
- Pressure conversion calculators for distinguishing between common measurements like pounds per square inch (PSI), pascals (Pa), and Bar
- Horsepower to kilowatt conversion calculators that you can count on for accurate conversions between these widely used power units.
Make Sure You’re Using Good-Quality Tools!
They may say “the poor workman blames his tools”. However, when it comes to conversions between units of measurement – a task in which accuracy really is of critical importance – you will hardly want to depend on bad ones.
So, in your search for the best online conversion calculators for your industrial or engineering project, we would advise you to double-check the reputation of the websites that provide them.
Indeed, it can be a good idea to run a particular conversion through multiple calculators from different sources – at least to begin with – to verify the accuracy of whatever online calculator you’re most thinking of using. With that done, you will be able to swiftly proceed to the rest of your project or installation, knowing you have the right calculation tools at close hand – crucial partners in your success.
