>>>> ~5 tons, enough for a 3000 sq ft house.
>>> And neither makes dimensional sense ;-)
>> 1 ton refers to the equivalent cooling power as melting 1 ton of ice -
> Still not dimensionally right.  Need time in the denominator.

Yes - "per hour".  A ton of cooling is 12 Kbtu, about the heat of
crystallization of one ton of water, per hour.

> Why do engineers use so many whacky units?  Why pretend Rumford and
> Joule never existed?  What's wrong with watts?

The same reason people will say "a bulb shedding about 40 watts of
light" when they really mean "about the light given off by a
bog-standard 40-watt light bulb" (meaning maybe as much as 6 watts of
light).  The same reason people still occasionally cite weight in
stones.  The reason people say thing like "weighs about two kilos" even
though "two kilos" is a mass, not weight, measurement.  The same reason
machine screws are still sized with small integers (as in the 6 in
"6-32") rather than overt measurements.

That is to say, tradition and convenience.

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