About the Inductance Converter
The Inductance Converter rescales an inductor's rated value between microhenries, millihenries and henries, the three units component datasheets and multimeters most commonly mix between. It is a quick way to translate a coil, transformer or PCB inductor spec from one unit prefix to another without doing the decimal-shifting by hand.
How It Works
Enter a value and pick the unit it's currently in and the unit you want to convert it to. The calculator converts your input to henries first using a fixed multiplier for the source unit, then divides by the multiplier for the target unit to get the final answer. A reference table also shows the same conversion applied to 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 units of your chosen 'from' unit.
Examples
Millihenries to microhenries
A 100 mH inductor converts to 100,000 uH, since each millihenry equals 1,000 microhenries.
Henries to millihenries
A 2.5 H transformer winding converts to 2,500 mH, useful when cross-checking a datasheet that lists inductance in henries against a meter that reads out in millihenries.
Advantages
- Removes the decimal-point errors that come from manually shifting between micro-, milli- and base-unit prefixes under time pressure.
- Includes a built-in reference table so you can see several multiples of the same conversion at a glance, not just a single value.
- Covers the specific unit range (uH to H) that actually shows up on inductor datasheets and LCR meters, rather than a generic unrelated set.
Common Mistakes
- Mixing up the micro and milli prefixes, which are off by a factor of 1,000 and look similar in a handwritten or rushed datasheet read.
- Assuming inductance converts on the same scale as capacitance, when the two use distinct unit prefix ranges even though the symbols look alike.
- Forgetting that the henry value alone doesn't describe how an inductor behaves at a specific frequency, which matters for filter or power-supply design beyond simple unit conversion.
Edge Cases to Watch For
- The three available units (uH, mH, H) don't include nanohenries, so sub-microhenry inductors used in RF work need to be entered as a decimal fraction of a microhenry.
- This is a pure unit-scaling tool - it converts the labeled henry value only and does not compute frequency-dependent behavior like inductive reactance, which depends on both inductance and signal frequency.
- The displayed result is rounded to 6 decimal places, which can show as 0.000000 for extremely small values converted into a much larger unit, for example a few nanohenries expressed in henries.
Common Use Cases
- Electronics hobbyists and students matching a component's printed or coded inductance value to a circuit schematic's units.
- Technicians comparing an LCR meter reading against a manufacturer's datasheet spec listed in a different unit prefix.
- Engineers documenting a bill of materials who need consistent unit prefixes across parts sourced from different suppliers.