Dear All,
For your comparison, Australian for home floor areas and office space
is given in square metres. Building lots are also specified in square
metres with a typical size being about 20 metres wide by 50 metres
deep giving an area of 1000 square metres. Recently, as older people
downsize for less home maintenance, and for more inner city, higher-
density space, the 1000 square metre lots are often halved to produce
500 square metre lots with smaller buildings. There is also a tendency
on newer estates to reduce allotments to 700 or 800 square metres.
Historically, many of the 1000 square metre lots would have been
measured as a chain (20.1 metres) wide by 2 1/2 chains long (50.3
metres) but nobody these days refers to old measures unless they do so
for historical reference. Farm sizes are invariably given in hectares
for real fully commercial farms. Interestingly, I was guest speaker at
a farmer's conference a few years ago when I encountered an SI unit
that I hadn't heard previously. It was a kilogram per hectare-
millimetre and it referred to the amount of production (in kilograms)
that could be obtained from an area (in hectares) of land that had
received rainfall or irrigation (in millimetres). It didn't matter
whether it was animal production or plant production as properties
from various parts of the state concerned could be readily compared
whatever their differences in rainfall.
Sadly, some unscrupulous land agents specialise in near suburban non-
viable 'farmlets' on the periphery of cities sell these in 2 hectare
allotments that they advertise as 'five acres'. The land has to be sub-
divided in metric measures so the dumbing down is the responsibility
of the selling agents. Presumably they do this because they think that
their city dwelling customers think that 5 is bigger than 2 so it must
be better! One would have thought that 20 000 square metres (20 normal
house lots) would appear to be even bigger to both unscrupulous agents
and to naive buyers.
Home roof area is also given in square metres and this is very
convenient for those of us who have rain water tanks in this second
driest of continents (surprisingly Antarctica is drier). As an
example, our house has a calculated area of 203.48 square metres; I
round this to 200 square metres so that when we have (say) 6
millimetres of rain, I simply calculate 6 mm x 200 square metres =
1200 litres to know how much water flowed into my rain water tank.
On 2008/12/04, at 6:04 AM, Martin Vlietstra wrote:
This shows what a mess imperial (or colonial) units are. Comparing
square feet and fractions of an acre is a nightmare. However,
comparing square metres and hectares is a doddle.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Michael J. Barnes
Sent: 03 December 2008 17:51
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:42123] RE: BBC web site keeps it metric
Stan,
I must disagree about U.S. residential lot sizes being expressed in
square feet, at least in my part of the country (New England). Site
plans, municipal tax records, real estate listings, and colloquial
references are almost exclusively expressed in acres (e.g. .25
acre, .34 acre, 1.00 acre or 1 acre, 1.50 acres, 2.18 acres, etc.).
--Mike Barnes
>>Residential lot sizes in the US are in square feet. Lot sizes are
in acres for farms. It doesn't make sense to use such a large unit
as acre or hectare in describing lot size when a more standard and
common unit (m, km etc) is available.
Stan Doore<<
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
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