Conversion from Decaliters to Kiloliters

Information about the Decaliter (daL)

The decalitre is a unit of volume equal to ten litres. Its symbol is daL, and the spelling dekalitre is also accepted. It sits between the litre of the household and the hectolitre of the trade, and although it once had a settled place in European markets it is now among the least written of the metric volume units.

Its historical role was as a physical measure rather than a number. Nineteenth-century French markets sold grain, potatoes, chestnuts and dried beans out of stamped cylindrical vessels holding one decalitre, half a decalitre or a double one, and a trader's set of these was inspected and verified like a set of weights. Selling dry goods by volume was faster than weighing them and needed no balance, so the vessels did real work.

Weighing displaced it. Once cheap accurate scales became universal, dry goods moved to mass, which is fairer to the buyer because it does not depend on how densely a load happens to settle. The decalitre lost its purpose along with the practice, and the vessels survive in museums and in the vocabulary of a few older markets rather than in commerce.

The quantity itself remains perfectly ordinary. Ten litres is a large household bucket, half a jerrycan, the fuel tank of a scooter, or a fortnight of drinking water for one person. It is roughly the volume of a cubic vessel twenty-two centimetres on a side, and it weighs ten kilograms when filled with water.

What killed the unit as a written form was the same pressure that removed deca everywhere else. Metric practice steps by factors of a thousand, so litres serve until about a thousand of them and hectolitres take over for trade quantities. Ten litres is written 10 L, which is shorter than 1 daL, needs no explanation, and sorts correctly beside 5 L and 200 L in the same table.

When the unit does appear, usually in an old record or a translated document, the conversion is a single step. Multiply by ten for litres, divide by ten for hectolitres, and the resulting figure will match modern usage without any loss of precision.

One decalitre equals 10 litres, 0.1 hectolitres, about 2.64 US gallons, or about 2.2 imperial gallons.

Information about the Kiloliter (kL)

The kilolitre is a unit of volume equal to one thousand litres, and therefore exactly one cubic metre. Its symbol is kL. The two names describe the same quantity, and which one appears depends entirely on the trade and the country: water utilities in the southern hemisphere say kilolitre where European ones say cubic metre.

Household water is where most people meet it. Australian, New Zealand and South African water bills are issued in kilolitres, tariffs are set as a price per kilolitre with rising blocks for heavier use, and drought restrictions are expressed as an allowance of so many kilolitres per household per quarter. A typical family uses between fifty and two hundred a year, so the annual bill fits in three digits.

Because the unit equals a cubic metre, it also carries an unusually direct physical meaning. A kilolitre of water weighs one tonne and would fill a cube one metre on each side, so a household allowance of a hundred kilolitres is a hundred tonnes of water, delivered, pumped and treated. Stating it that way is one reason the unit appears in conservation campaigns as often as on invoices.

Bulk liquid logistics uses it for cargo. A flexible tank fitted inside a shipping container carries around twenty-four kilolitres of wine, juice or edible oil, road tankers are rated in kilolitres, and depot storage is planned in thousands of them. Japanese petroleum statistics are published in kilolitres rather than in barrels, which makes Japanese energy figures awkward to compare with those of countries that use the barrel.

Industry generally prefers the cubic metre for the same quantity, because it is the coherent SI form and because it multiplies cleanly with metres of head, square metres of surface and other dimensional quantities. The kilolitre survives where the substance being measured is a liquid sold to the public, which is exactly where a name containing the word litre reads more naturally.

Converting is trivial in one direction and awkward in the other. One kilolitre is one cubic metre exactly and a thousand litres exactly, but 264.2 United States gallons and 220 imperial gallons, and about 6.29 barrels of oil, none of which are round numbers.

One kilolitre equals 1000 litres, 1 cubic metre, about 264.2 US gallons, or about 220 imperial gallons.