Feet to Meter Converter for Dubai and the UAE

You measure a wall and it comes to eight feet six inches. You open a converter and type 8.6.

The converter gives you 2.621 metres. The real answer is 2.591 metres. You are three centimetres out.

The reason is that there are twelve inches in a foot, so six inches is half a foot, which is 0.5 and not 0.6.

Three centimetres does not sound like much. On a cut piece of skirting it is a visible gap. On a worktop it is a piece that does not fit.

That is why this tool takes feet and inches in separate boxes and does the conversion itself.

A few conversions worth carrying in your head on a site.

This country uses metric officially and imperial informally, and both appear on the same job.

Property is advertised in square feet, so room sizes are often described in feet.

Building materials, drawings and trade quotes are metric.

Pipe is a special case. Plumbing pipe is still commonly described in inches, so a half inch or three quarter inch pipe, even where everything around it is metric.

Timber often comes in imperial nominal sizes with metric actual sizes, which catches people out.

So the practical advice is to pick one unit for a job and convert everything into it at the start, rather than converting back and forth as you go.

Conversion is only useful if the measurement was right in the first place.