Minutes to Hours Converter

With this minutes to hours converter, you can easily convert between hours, minutes, and seconds, and even carry out time conversion using the hours:minutes:seconds notation. Although it is called minutes to hours converter, this tool not only tells you how to convert minutes to hours, but you can also use it as a seconds to minutes converter, or to answer questions like "how many seconds in an hour?" for example.

Also, when using the minutes to hours converter, you can enter decimal time values like 2.7 hours, and the time converter will give you the equivalent values in decimal minutes, decimal seconds, and hours:minutes:seconds notation.

We've all used the hour as a unit of time, and we know that one hour is equal to 60 minutes, and one minute is equivalent to 60 seconds. But what came first? The hour, the minute, or the second? And how are they defined?

Historically, the Earth's rotation cycle was used to define the hour, the minute, and the second such as one full rotation takes 24 hours or 24 * 60 = 1,440 minutes or 1440 * 60 = 86,400 seconds. The later formal definition of the SI units of time uses the second as the base unit and defines it precisely as "The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom."

Naturally, the hour, minute, and second are not the only time units. For longer time measurements, we can use the day (= 24 hours), the week (= 7 days), the month (around 30 days), or the year (around 365 days)... And for shorter events, we can use the millisecond (1/1000 second), the microsecond (1/1000 millisecond), or the nanosecond (1/1000 microsecond)...

Time conversion between hours, minutes, and seconds can be intuitively tricky because of the fundamental difference between the way we partition time units, and the decimal system that we use to partition most other numbers. For example, when we say "one and a half" or "1.5" liters of water, we associate the first decimal digit 5 with the quantity one half. However, for time measurements, we often use the hour:minute:second notation in which one and a half hours is equal to 1 h 30 min. In this case, the minute digits 30 are associated with the quantity one half.

Converting between hours, minutes, and seconds using decimal time is relatively straightforward:

• time in seconds = time in minutes * 60 = time in hours × 3600
• time in minutes = time in seconds / 60 = time in hours × 60
• time in hours = time in minutes / 60 = time in seconds / 3600

When it comes to the hour:minute:second time conversion, things get a bit more complicated. If you need to convert from this form to one of the others (hours, minutes, or seconds), you can take each field of the hrs:min:sec time and convert it to the required unit (using the above equations), then add up the results.

If you need to convert from one of the decimal time forms (hours, minutes, or seconds) to the hrs:min:sec form, you can do so with the following steps:

• Convert your time to hours (using the 3^rd equation above);
• Take the integer part of the result: it corresponds to the hours field;
• Take the decimal part of the result and multiply it by 60;
• Take the integer part of the new result: it corresponds to the minutes field;
• Take the decimal part of that result and multiply it by 60; and
• Round your last result to the nearest integer: it corresponds to the seconds field.

Now that you know how the minutes to hours converter works, understand how to convert minutes to hours, and how many seconds in an hour, let's take a look at a practical example. We'll show how you can use it for your time conversions (as a seconds to minutes converter, hours to seconds converter, or any other combination...) to convert between hours, minutes, seconds, and (hour:minute:second) time units.

When you open our minutes to hours converter, you are presented with four lines:

1. The Hours field;
2. The Minutes field;
3. The Seconds field; and
4. The Time field with an hrs:min:sec notation.

If you want to convert a time value from one unit to another, all you have to do is fill your value in the corresponding field of the original unit; the converter will immediately give you your converted time value in all other three units.

For example, let's say you have a timer-equipped generator that you used for 23 min and 47 sec. It burned a total of 6.4 liters of fuel, and you wish to calculate how much exactly does it burn per hour. To do so, first, you need to determine, in decimal form, how many hours it ran for:

1. You enter 0 in the hrs field of the Time line of the converter;
2. You input 23 in the min field of the Time line; and
3. You write 47 in the sec field of the Time line.

The calculator gives you 0.3964 in the Hours line.
4. Finally, you divide 6.4 by 0.3964 to get your hourly fuel consumption of 16.15 liters per hour.

Converters are very handy when you want to switch between different units or use an appropriate unit for the size of the quantity you're measuring. They can be used in everyday life situations, like the temperature converter; in physics, like the weight converter; in geometrical problems, like the length converter or the volume converter, and many others. Make sure to check them out in our converters section!