Talk:Ton of refrigeration

Article name
I think the more common term is 'Refrigeration ton', abbreviated 'RT', and therefore this article should be renamed, to replace the current re-direct of 'Refrigeration ton'. 'tons of refrigeration' seems to be a US-only term.
 * Is the "ton" as a unit of energy power actually used outside the US? Kendall-K1 (talk) 22:28, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Wrong physical unit
How does it matter if the ice is melted in 24 h or in 1 h? A certain amount of heat is absorbed be the melting. Period.

Never heard of this weird unit and came here looking for it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hennui (talk • contribs) 13:02, 24 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Agreed it is an unusual unit of measurement. It is a unit of power, not energy, so it is a rate of heat transfer, not an amount of heat. At the rate of "one ton" it takes 24 hours to transfer enough heat to melt one ton of ice. A better name for it would have been "ton per day." The definition in the article is misleading, I'll see if I can fix it. Kendall-K1 (talk) 15:18, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

I was unable to check Mark's. The NIST source says a ton is "12 000 BtuIT/h" (which would be exactly 3516.8533... watts) but doesn't say that's the definition. I doubt very much that it is definied in terms of real blocks of ice, as our article says, but maybe it is. Kendall-K1 (talk) 16:01, 24 October 2016 (UTC)


 * It's like the horsepower and the candlepower: it had its conceptual origins in a simple notion, but it ended up defined later in a precise physics-based definition. Actually it is interesting that the same is true of the meter and the second as well (originated as simple concept and later precisely defined). — ¾-10 04:36, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Which btu?
There are several different definitions of btu, but we give an exact conversion to kW, so shouldn't we say which btu we're using? GA-RT-22 (talk) 11:08, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * It's the International Steam Tables Btu. I'll add the subscript "IT" to the article. Indefatigable (talk) 13:52, 19 August 2023 (UTC)