The duration calculator measures the span between two full date-and-time points, which is what you need when an interval runs longer than a day: a hire period, a stay, a build, a fermentation, a race. The answer comes back as days, hours and minutes, and separately as a total in hours and in minutes for anyone feeding it into a rota or capacity calculation.
Because both ends carry a time as well as a date, this avoids the ambiguity that dogs day-only sums. A car collected at 4.00 pm on Friday and returned at 10.00 am on Monday is a hire of two days and 18 hours; counted as dates alone it is three days, and counted as nights it is three as well. Where money attaches to the figure, the time-of-day version is the one that reflects what actually happened.
Durations spanning the March or October clock change in the UK are computed on elapsed real time, so the spring changeover shortens the interval by an hour and the autumn one lengthens it. That is usually the right answer for anything measured by a stopwatch or a meter and the wrong answer for anything defined by the calendar, so it is worth being clear about which of the two a booking or a contract actually specifies before quoting the number.
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