Close

What is horsepower?

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

When it comes to purchasing an air compressor knowing your requirements and needs before hand are important. One of the measures you need to know during the first part of the buying stage is the horsepower of your compressor. In this article, we go over why horsepower is important and even learn where the name first came from.

What is horsepower?

What is the first thing you think about when you hear the word horsepower? A powerboat? A car? A motor? Makes sense because horsepower is a measure of what a motor can do and how fast it can go. Take a car, for example, the higher the horsepower, the faster the car can go. So where did the term come from, then? According to LiveScience the term was first coined in the late 1700s by James Watt. Looking for a way to advertise his steam engines, he invented a unit of measurement that would effectively showcase the superiority of his steam engines compared with something people were familiar with; horses.

However, instead of figuring out exactly how much power a horse really produced, he estimated. Watt guessed that a pony could lift and average of 220lbf (pound-force) 100 ft. per minute (220 lbf x 100ft./min.= 22,000lbf x ft./min.). From there, he extrapolated that horse, or horsepower, to 33,000 lbf x ft./min. One would assume based on the term that a horse could produce 1 horsepower. Actually, the maximum output of a horse is closer to 15 horsepower.

Using the car analogy, it is easy to think that the higher the horsepower air compressor the better for your application, but that it not always the case. It is important to make sure the rated horsepower matches your application; generating too much air can be just as detrimental to your system as not producing enough and choosing the wrong air compressor for your facility can lead to problems with production and increase costs due to wasted energy.

A motor in an air compressors job is simply to drive the cylinders that compress air. This is a complex process. As a result, the amount of horsepower a motor has and the amount of work a compressor can do is not always straightforward. If a 5 HP air compressor and a 10 HP ar compressor can both produce the amount of compressed air needed for the job, the 5HP model working more efficiently, saving you money on fuel without loss in performance. In this case, the 5cHP model is the proper air compressor for the application. On the other hand, a 5 HP compressor can't do the same job as a 100 HP compressor. That is why it is very important to make sure you get the correct HP compressor.

Not sure what horsepower compressor you need for your application?

What is horsepower?

explainer icon