Pair your load with the right power.

How long will a power station run my appliances?

A “1000W power station” is two numbers in one label: watts decide whether a load starts, watt-hours decide how long it lasts. Runtime is not the second divided by the first.

The three corrections in between

All three make the answer smaller: a fridge compressor does not run continuously, an inverter loses some of what it moves, and the station draws power just being switched on. The calculator applies all three, names each one, and shows the division.

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Reading the configuration in your link and re-running the engine on it. Underneath this panel is the page's built-in WORKED EXAMPLE — not your shared plan; it is covered for a moment so it cannot be mistaken for your answer.

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Worked example

BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 × Full-size refrigerator

Yes, it runs it 28 h

Averaged over a duty cycle of 85%, plus 10 W of the station's own consumption in the denominator, over 1,586 Wh of usable energy that already carries the inverter loss. Not a label-wattage guess.

officialverified 2026-08-01US unit

Usable energy 1,586 Wh
Load vs output 2.1%

1,586 Wh usable ÷ 57 W drawn (47 W load + 10 W station) = 28 h

How the verdict was reached

  • Running load vs continuous output within limit

    55 W of 2,600 W — 2.1% used

    Anything above 82% of continuous output is downgraded to "tight".

  • Start-up surge vs surge ceiling within limit

    286 W of 2,600 W — 11% used

    This brand publishes no surge peak for this model, so the check used its continuous output rating instead: the lowest figure an inverter could physically have, not a manufacturer specification. A real machine almost certainly does better than that, and we are not going to guess by how much.

  • Inverter waveform vs load requirement within limit

    Load has no waveform requirement

  • Usable energy available within limit

    1,586 Wh deliverable

View at BLUETTI Official Store (US) → Only shown for records with a verified purchase link. The rest carry no button rather than a guessed one.

Not your setup? Change it

Everything above recalculates as you change these. Nothing is sent anywhere — the engine runs in your browser on the same data the page was built from.

6 of the 26 machines here publish enough to defend a runtime in hours. The other 20 return an energy rate instead — see below for why.

Loads to run

Computing

Cooking

Cooling

Heating

Internet

Laundry

Lighting

Medical

Power tools

Pumps

Refrigeration

RV & marine

TV & entertainment

Worked examples

Every figure below is this page's own engine run at build time on the BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 Portable Power Station, not a table anyone typed. The last row is the three loads running together, which is the case a single-appliance calculator cannot answer.

Load Running draw Duty-weighted Runtime Verdict
Full-size refrigerator 55 W 47 W 28 h Yes, it runs it
CPAP machine 22 W 22 W 50 h Yes, it runs it
Laptop computer 5.2 W 5.2 W 104 h Yes, it runs it
Full-size refrigerator + CPAP machine + Laptop computer 82 W 74 W 19 h Yes, it runs it

Usable energy for this model is 1,586.3 Wh , derived from official coefficients rather than read off a spec sheet: the manual publishes the formula and every coefficient but not the result. Confidence on a derived figure is capped at medium by policy, and it is labelled as derived everywhere it appears.

What the other 23 records show instead

This is not a gap we are papering over — it is the difference between this tool and the ones that will happily divide a nameplate number for you.

EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus × Full-size refrigerator

This brand publishes no defensible usable-capacity figure for this model, and nameplate watt-hours are not it. Rather than divide a number we do not have, here is what the load actually costs per hour — which needs no battery figure at all and is what you size against.

This load costs 47 Wh per hour

Averaged over the duty cycle — what the load actually costs per hour of being switched on.

Missing: station usable capacity

The formula, and where each term comes from

runtime h = usable Wh ÷ (running W × duty cycle + station self-consumption W)

Four inputs, three of which most calculators drop. Each is a field in the library with its own source, date and confidence — none of them is a constant we chose.

  • Usable energy, not nameplate

    The number on the box is cell capacity. What reaches your appliance is that, times the depth of discharge the pack actually allows, times inverter efficiency. For the worked example the manual publishes all three and not the product, so the library derives it and marks it derived — 2,073.6 Wh × 90% × 85% = 1,586.3 Wh . Where the basis already contains the inverter loss, the engine does not apply it a second time. engine_default

  • Duty cycle

    A fridge compressor is not on for an hour every hour. Two defensible readings exist and they are not interchangeable: a regulation's formula constant and observed field behaviour. The library stores the field figure as the headline and keeps the regulatory one as an interval endpoint, so a runtime can come back as a range instead of a false point. engine parameter compat.duty_cycle_point_basis · appliance_evidence

  • The station's own consumption

    A power station spends energy being switched on. The manufacturer's own runtime formula for the worked example divides by (load + self-consumption), so leaving it out is not conservative — it is wrong in the flattering direction, by roughly 190% on a laptop-sized load. Where a brand publishes no figure, the engine adds nothing and says the hours are optimistic by that unknown margin rather than substituting a guess. engine parameter compat.include_station_idle_draw · appliance_evidence

  • And separately: can it run at all?

    Runtime only means something once the load starts and stays running. That is a different calculation against continuous output, surge ceiling, apparent power and waveform; anything above 82% of continuous output is downgraded to “tight”. Where no inverter efficiency is published at all, the engine assumes 85% and flags the result as an estimate rather than quietly using it. engine parameter compat.marginal_load_ratio · prd_hard_rule

How these numbers are graded

Every field carries a source tier, a source URL, a verification date and a confidence grade, and the verdict inherits the weakest of them — a conclusion is exactly as good as its worst input, so the grades are a minimum, never an average. A figure computed from a manufacturer's own coefficients stays official but is capped at medium confidence and labelled as derived. Typing your own wattage into the calculator drops the whole result to unsourced, on purpose: your number cannot inherit our labels.

Coverage today, read from the library at build time rather than claimed: 6 of 29 station records can carry a runtime in hours, 26 are complete enough for a full page, and 30 appliance profiles are available as loads. No lab measurement exists in the library yet; when one does it will be labelled as such, and nothing on this site claims one before then.

Questions people actually ask

How long will a power station run a refrigerator?
On the worked example above — a BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 Portable Power Station against a full-size refrigerator — the engine returns 28 hours. That is not nameplate watt-hours divided by nameplate watts. The refrigerator's compressor only runs part of the time, the station consumes power just being switched on, and the usable energy is smaller than the number on the box. Change the station and the fridge's duty cycle in the calculator to see how much each of those three moves the answer.
Why does this tool refuse to give hours for most power stations?
Hours require a defensible usable-capacity figure, and 23 of the 29 records in the library do not have one — the brand publishes a nameplate watt-hour number and nothing about depth of discharge or inverter efficiency. Dividing that nameplate by your load would produce a confident-looking number that is wrong by 20–35%. For those stations the tool gives you the load's energy rate in watt-hours per hour instead, which needs no battery figure at all and is the number you actually size against.
Is a 1000W power station the same as a 1000Wh power station?
No, and the two get mixed up constantly. Watts (W) are how much you can draw at once — the ceiling on what will start and stay running. Watt-hours (Wh) are how much energy is stored — how long it lasts. A 1000 W ceiling with a 500 Wh battery runs a big load briefly; 300 W with 2000 Wh runs a small load for a long time. This calculator uses both: the watt figure decides the verdict, the watt-hour figure decides the runtime.
Does the calculator include the power station’s own consumption?
Yes, in the denominator. A station draws power simply by being on — for the worked example the manufacturer’s manual puts it at 10 W, and the manufacturer’s own runtime formula divides by (load + self-consumption). Leaving it out overstates the runtime of a small load dramatically: on a 5 W laptop it is the difference between a plausible figure and one roughly three times too high. Where a brand publishes no self-consumption figure, the tool says so rather than inventing one, and flags that the hours are optimistic by that unknown margin.
What surge figure does the verdict use when a brand publishes none?
The continuous output rating. An inverter cannot physically surge below what it delivers continuously, so that number is the lowest its surge capability could possibly be — and using the lowest possible figure is the only assumption that fails safely. Real machines usually manage 1.5–2× more than that, but we do not know how much more for this one and will not guess: wherever the evidence list uses this substitute it says so on the row, and it is never presented as a manufacturer specification.
Do not own one yet?

This page assumes you already have a machine in mind. If the question is which one to buy, answer four questions instead

Refilling it from solar

Runtime is half a day. How long the same pack takes to come back, and whether your panels may legally be wired to it at all, is check the panels against the input

Sizing a system rather than a box

For a balcony or off-grid setup the question is kilowatts of array and kilowatt-hours of storage, not hours on one machine — size the array and the storage

From the Knowledge channel

The lede above corrects two units in a sentence, which is the whole answer for some readers and the start of it for others. The long form, with the third quantity neither of them mentions — What do the watts and watt-hours on a power station actually mean?

Runs it · 28 h BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 · from $1,099

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