Generator Question

I think you would need to be concerned if you had to run central air, which would take about 4000 watts IIRC. Refrigerator and A/C should be no more than 2000 and window unit no more than 1500. Your running wattage is what you want to pay attention to.

Does it say 7000 running on NG or with propane?

Mine is a Harbor Freight predator 8750/7000 inverter. It ran my whole 2800sq foot house except dryer and oven. Water heaters, cooktop is NG. 2 ac units (2.5 ton and 3 ton) with no soft starts, I was able to run my 2.5 ton ac and the fan on the 3 ton in addition to everything else. Gonna put a soft start kit on both of them soon.

Great news. I spent way too much on a fancy generator with a fancy controller so you don’t have to:


10 tons (3 units) of AC, a fridge/freezer, mini fridge, standup fridge, stand up freezer, all the lights, TVs running was an 11.5kW load in my house (this was an August afternoon, so all 3 units were blowing and going).


Then I turned on the washing machine, dryer, microwave, two wall ovens. I got it up to 23.2kW with that.


You should be fine on that. If you plan on powering your house for 2 weeks, you may run into some problems if you never shut it down. But for a couple days, probably no real problem. Make sure to keep an oil change or two on hand if you’re going this far into disaster planning, or your “short term” solution will be much shorter than it otherwise could be.


Also, you say window unit. If this isn’t permanently installed and something you don’t already have, make sure you realize there are standup portable units with window exhaust that are a lot easier to install/remove than a traditional window unit (usually on wheels and on a floor with a thin PVC panel with exhaust hose rather than trying to mount a full unit. No, it’s not that heavy or hard to do, and it’s not worth replacing something you’ve got. But if you’ve got a helpless wife and babies, it’s way easier to do alone)




I’m jealous of your tri-fuel. I wanted to go that route again and tie in the 3 breakers with my fridges and a 2.5T unit that runs just my bedroom, bathroom, and nursery. I lost the vote 1-1.