Radiator sizes

[Andy Hall]

I would do except that it really is 18mm and not the deprecated unit.

[Andy Hall]

I meant as opposed to 2000mm by 1000mm or 1500mm.

[:Jerry:]

That's even more daft!

[Roger Mills]

But if you work throughout in one consistent set of units, there's no conversion to do!

[Roger Mills]

Have you tried buying concrete in cubic millimetres? For most jobs, you'd need rather a lot of them!

[Andy Hall]

The only reason is because the sizes have been taken from deprecated imperial units. It's the same as pots of jam weighing 464g rather than 500g or pints of beer vs 500ml

[Andy Hall]

Assuming that you can get all of the data in one set of units. There are manufacturers who have dumped BTUs/hr and so a conversion is implied if you wanted to make life hard and work in those units.

[Andy Hall]

Then I should get a better discount.

[Roger Mills]

Unfortunately. you can't buy paint in 568ml tins. There are a lot of jobs for which half a litre ain't enough, whereas a pint would have been fine. Similarly with litres and quarts.

If only the powers that be would follow the age-old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

You seem keen to dismiss out of hand anything which is "deprecated" - which simply means disapproved of (by whom?) or non-preferred.

But there are a hell of a lot of people about who still think in Imperial units and have an instinctive feel for what 7'6" looks like, or how heavy half a cwt feels.

Personally, I don't particularly care - being reasonably multi-lingual, having trained in Physics in the 60's (using CGS rather than MKS or S.I. units!), and having spent the early part of my career predicting the accelerative performance of motor cars in fps units.

If people want to design their heating systems using British Thermal Units and degrees Fahrenheit, good luck to them!

[The Medway Handyman]

I think that's deliberate - they know how much paint an average room needs & sell it in tins deliberately too small.

Conspiracy theory followers - to me!

[Andy Hall]

Hmm.....

But it is broken.

It's hard to justify a system of counting and measuring that involves counting in 12s, 16s and so on. What kind of nonsense is that?

That will change in the next 10-20 years as they pop their clogs.

One only has to look at what happens in countries still using it. In the U.S. you end up with special calculators to do fractions. A complete mess.

[:Jerry:]

No the size is chosen as a standard for many reasons, mostly usability, handling, storage and packaging/transportation.

[Roger]

The message from Andy Hall contains these words:

No, the real nonsense is that decimal took hold when the ignorami started counting on their fingers. Base 12 makes for a more sensible system. I have a vague idea that base 16 plays some small part in computers but 16 is a less versatile number than 12 being divisible only by some powers of 2. (2, 4 and 8). 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 while 10 only by 2 and 5.

The inch, foot, yard and even fathom have the additional advantage of being practical units, approximating to width of thumb, length of foot, length of stride and out of depth.

[Andy Hall]

This would all hold some water if one base were used. Having three makes no real sense.

Possibly, but we don't use cubits any more either.

[Andy Hall]

Pull the other one.

[Owain]

Would that be 6' x 3' x 3/4" by any chance?

Owain

[Roger Mills]

My computer seems to manage to count in 2's and 16's ok!

Besides which, most things around the house can be measured in inches and decimal inches - which gives more manageable numbers than millimetres.

God help us when the world is run by the current generation of youngsters who can't even add 2 and 2 together without using a calculator - and have no instictive feel whatsoever for what the result of a calculation should be, making it impossible for them to do a sanity check on calculator/computer output. The units are a secondary consideration!

[Frank Erskine]

If you went into my local timber merchant/sawmill and asked for 3m of

100mm x 50mm you'd be laughed out of the place.

[Andy Hall]

Oh nonsense. It's much easier to deal with whole numbers

There I would certainly agree

[Andy Hall]

Curious.

Not here. They do everything in metric, and that's sawmills and even questionable places like Travis Perkins.

Is it possible that Napoleon needs to march a bit further north? Either that or the Duke of Wellington, native of these parts, distracted him?