Sizing hub

What can a portable power station run?

Two ways in, one sizing engine. Pick a single device when you want to know how many hours you get, or a whole situation when several things have to stay on at once.

Start here if you have one thing in mind

One device

Each device page starts from a sourced running-watt figure and its startup surge, then shows projected runtime at four common capacities and which tracked stations clear the load. Use this route when the answer you want is a number of hours.

Browse the full appliance index →

Start here if several things run at once

The whole situation

A scenario adds up every device on the list, applies each one’s duty cycle over the days you plan to cover, and then checks capacity, continuous output, startup surge, and solar recharge against every tracked station. Use this route when one device’s runtime is not the constraint — the total is.

Or start from a complete kit checklist →

How both routes are calculated

Energy, not just watts

A device’s running watts tell you whether a station can turn it on. Watt-hours tell you how long it stays on. Both pages compute daily energy as running watts multiplied by hours of actual operation, so a refrigerator that cycles roughly a third of the time is charged for a third of the day rather than all of it.

Usable capacity, not nameplate

Nameplate watt-hours are the cell total. What reaches your appliance is smaller: some is held back by the depth-of-discharge limit, and more is lost turning DC into AC. Every fit check here works from the usable figure, so a 1,000 Wh station is never credited with 1,000 Wh of work.

Startup surge decides pass or fail

Motors and compressors draw several times their running watts for the first moment. A station whose inverter cannot supply that peak will not start the appliance at all, however large its battery. Where no surge figure has been published for a motor-driven device, the check is marked unverified rather than passed.

Every input is sourced or withheld

Device draws come from manufacturer documentation or independent measurement, each carrying its own source link and date. A topic with no complete sourced record is not published — which is why the lists above are shorter than the number of devices people ask about.

Want to size something that is not listed? Build your own load list in the sizing tool.

How to read a scenario

A scenario is a claim about a day — which appliances run, for how long, across how many days — and everything else on the page is arithmetic performed on that claim. So the useful reading order runs against the layout: check whether the manifest describes your day before you look at which stations pass it, because a plan built on somebody else's assumptions returns a confident answer to a question you did not ask.

The daily rate travels better than the total

Durations on these pages are planning choices we made, not forecasts, and nobody gets to choose how long an outage lasts. The figure worth carrying away is energy per day, because that half comes from sourced device documentation rather than from our guess about the calendar. Multiply it yourself, against a number of days you are willing to defend, and you have done the only part of this that is genuinely personal.

Some plans have no answer, and say so

Where nothing in the catalogue covers a plan, the page states that plainly instead of recommending the largest unit we track and letting the arithmetic embarrass you later. Those pages stay published and stay linked, because a reader who lands on one still deserves the reasoning. What they do not do is enter the index — a requirement nothing can meet belongs to a class of hardware, home batteries and generators, that this site does not yet cover and will not pretend to.

Read the limits before the recommendations

Each scenario ends with what its plan does not model, and that block is where the assumption most likely to be wrong for you gets named. It is a faster route to knowing whether the answer above it applies to your house, your rig, or your weather than any amount of studying the station cards, and it occasionally tells you the honest answer is to change the plan rather than the purchase.

Edit the plan rather than trusting it

Every scenario opens in the sizing tool with its own manifest already loaded. Change one line — the hours, the quantity, whether something runs on 12 V instead of through the inverter — and the same checks rerun against the same catalogue. That is what these pages are for: a starting point close enough to your situation to be worth editing, rather than an answer to accept.