How many metres in a story?

I asked my friend David, an architect, to give me a ballpark figure for how tall a “story” is in a building. Because measurements in the media are often given in “stories” — like “the giant wave was over 10 stories tall” — I wanted to have an ability to make approximate calculations. Here’s what David told me:

A building like the new Government of Canada building would be 4 to 5 metres a story. A house would be more like 3m.

My original reason for asking was to add some real-worldness to this post about wind turbines. The wind seems to get really interesting at the 80m level here in Charlottetown — using David’s figures, that’s about the height of a 17 story office building. In other words, very tall.

Too tall for my back yard.