Acres, Hectares & All that.

A relic of our past that might be improved I think is our measurement system, though I don't think it's likely to happen at all soon.

I was just reading a property described as being on a block of almost a quarter of an acre, I'm always reaching for the mental calculator (and sometimes google!) when people start talking about perches, acres, roods and so forth.

One measurement I quite like that I have encountered in Europe is for 100m2 (In Lithuania it's called an 'aras') which I think is wonderfully easy to comprehend.

Anyway I'm miles away from a solution on this one ;)
 
I remember a quarter-acre as 1000sqm, and a hectare is 10 of them, although I have no idea how much a perch or rood is.

The thing I can never get a feel for is 'squares'. Like how many square metres are there in a square?
 
I remember a quarter-acre as 1000sqm, and a hectare is 10 of them, although I have no idea how much a perch or rood is.
Neither do I, but I do know there are three barleycorns to an inch, if that helps.

The thing I can never get a feel for is 'squares'. Like how many square metres are there in a square?
An imperial square is 100 sq feet or 10ftx10ft, 3 meters is roughly 10ft, so approx 9 sqm to an imperial square.:)
 
The frontages of many Melbourne inner suburban blocks are a chain (33 Feet) or 1/2 chain 16.5 Feet).

Cheers

Pete
 
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I put all this is in my phone........

edit: some of the stuff I put here originally was rounded.

I've edited it down, checked the figures, and recalc'ed using excel.
Here's a shorter list with measures more applicable to property.

property%20measures.gif
 
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I reckon hectares and square metres are perfect. All that needs to happen is for people to convert and stop using all the other ridiculous measures.

The old man [age 70] still talks in acres and pounds and ounces, and it drives me crazy. If he's doing a spray job, he needs a lot of calculations to work it all out, when if he used litres and hectares it's simple. Or for tonnes per hectare, he's talking bags and bushels per acre. A bushel is a volume, not weight for flip sake, so they still talk this crap in the US. If your talking an amount of grain, you then have to convert the bushels to weight, no wonder they are in strife over there. Remember the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because someone from NASA punched in miles instead of kilometres into a calculation?


See ya's.
 
I agree with converting everything over to metric. In fact it may even be worth banning advertising is old style units. No acres. No quoting squares, since most people don't know what a square is but still try to use them in conversation.

Only thing I have trouble thinking off in terms of centimeters is someone's height. For some reason I still think in feet and inches for that measure alone.
 
Midwives give you baby measurements both ways. So you can tell your young friends it weighed 3 kilos and your nanna it weighed 7 pounds ...
 
Midwives give you baby measurements both ways. So you can tell your young friends it weighed 3 kilos and your nanna it weighed 7 pounds ...

Yeah, our girl was 3kg, I had no idea what that is in old-people-speak.

Whenever someone uses an imperial measurement, I ask them "What's that in French?", which gets me a blank stare 99% of the time.

My dad's argument against the metric system is funny... On the news they talk about waves of 1.8 metres and Dad says, why don't they just say 6-foot waves, instead of 'o n e - p o i n t - e i g h t' metres! I respond by saying yes but what if they were exactly 2 metres, then you'd have to say 'six foot, six-and-three-quarter-inch waves!' But he sticks to his argument.
 
There's 66ft in a chain, same as the lengh of a cricket pitch.:)

and a chain is 20.12m - same old quarter acre frontage that most places in australia have. and so the circle is complete.

in WA it was designed this way so families could have a full length cricket pitch out back - kid you not!
 
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