How To Calculate Horsepower

Hi, my names Charles and I'm one of the math teachers from the Maxim workshop. I'm just going to now teach you how to do some math. In this video, I'm going to calculate horsepower.

Horsepower is not a standard SI unit but it was a unit that was used because of, say possibly the power of horses when using carriages and stuff like that, so I mean it's something that relates to more so ancient measurements and medieval times and stuff. So whenever you are looking at horsepower, you need to know the calibration from horsepower to watts. So, if we take a certain number of watts, we want to know how many horsepower that relates to.

So we have 750 watts equalled to 1 HP, which is our notation for horsepower. Now if you look at some of the standard sports cars that you might find around now, if you watch Top Gear and stuff like that, you would find possibly cars ranging within the order of 300,000 watts. That's the power of the standard sports car engine that you might find.

I mean, you might find some with more, some with less, but I mean that is a good value to use. Now, we would want to use the calibration to see how many horsepowers we find within a standard sportscar that uses 300,000 watts for its engine. So if we want to find out how many horsepower is within a car like this, we would say 300,000 divided by 750.

And we would have watts here and watts here, and obviously, our horsepower is just the equivalent of that. So we would say 300,000 divided by 750, that comes out to 400 horsepower. Okay, so that's how to calculate horsepower. .