25 October 2024

1 April 1975

 Almost 49 years ago, on 1 April 1975, Canada started on the road to converting to the Metric System with the announcement that from then on temperature would be reported in Celsius instead of Farenheit.

I was still in high school at the time and was an early adopter.

I'm now retired and I STILL find Farenheit being used in random places.

About a year ago, I opened the control panel to our hot tub and flipped the dip switch to display to Celsius instead of Farenheit.  I did my own research to learn how to do this properly without screwing up something else.

Just yesterday, I did the same thing to our water heating system and it now displays 48.5C instead of whatever 120 meant.  AE then noted, "wow that sounds hot" (she's 11 years younger than me, so 120 means even less to her).

In both the above cases, the dip switch guantees that a power failure or software modification won't change the settings from Celsius.  Although it was some tricky trouble to actually do the change.

Last year I assisted friends to correct their thermostat to display Celsius.

The president of the local Legion (an older man than me) is pleased to report the upgrade to the heating system ensures that the temperature inside the Legion is set to a comfortable 23.  AE's parents also use Celuis.  After all, that's all you hear on Canadian media (it's weird to hear American weather reports).

I've been taking flight school and it's like a trip back in time as everything uses the old imperial systems: an airplane speed is in knots, it flies at several thousand feet, it takes gallons of fuel (hmm, imperial or US gallons?).  HOWEVER, even air traffic uses Celsius to indicate such things as dew point and the rate of temperature change with altitute.

This is why it's strange to see Farenheit displayed on buildings anywhere in Canada.

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