Volume Calculator for Dubai and the UAE

For a rectangular space it is length times width times height. Three measurements multiplied together.

For a cylinder it is the area of the circle at the end, times the length or the height. So pi times the radius squared, times the depth.

The radius is half the diameter, so measure across the widest point and halve it.

A cylinder lying down, such as a horizontal tank or a length of pipe, is the same calculation with the length taking the place of the height.

Everything else about volume is what you do with the number.

One cubic metre is exactly one thousand litres. This is the cleanest conversion in measurement and it is worth knowing.

So a tank one metre by one metre by one metre holds a thousand litres.

A water tank sold as two thousand litres therefore occupies two cubic metres of space, before you allow for its walls and the room to get around it.

Imperial gallons appear too, because some tanks here are still sold that way. One imperial gallon is about 4.55 litres, so a thousand litre tank is around 220 gallons.

Be careful with gallons generally, because the American gallon is smaller at about 3.79 litres. If a figure looks wrong by roughly a fifth, that is usually why.

An air conditioner cools the air in a room, and how much air there is depends on the height as well as the floor.

Two rooms with the same twenty square metre floor can hold very different amounts of air. One with a 2.7 metre ceiling holds 54 cubic metres. One with a 4 metre ceiling holds 80.

That is nearly half as much again to cool, in a room that looks the same size on a floor plan.

It is the usual explanation for somebody who moves from an apartment to a villa and finds the same size unit no longer keeps up.

Double height spaces are the extreme case. A majlis with a six metre ceiling has twice the air of the same room at three metres, and sizing it from floor area alone will always be wrong.

Once you have the volume, the AC tools on this site turn it into a BTU figure.

A tank rated at two thousand litres does not hold two thousand litres of usable water.

There is freeboard at the top, which is the gap between the maximum water level and the lid. Without it the tank overflows every time the float valve is slow.

There is also the outlet position at the bottom. Water below the outlet cannot leave the tank, and there is usually a small amount of sediment sitting there that you would not want to draw anyway.

So the working capacity is usually around ninety per cent of the nominal figure, and that is what the fill setting in this tool is for.

When sizing a tank, work from the usable volume rather than the number on the label. That is the water you can actually use.