Quick answer: About 800 Wh of a 1000Wh power station reaches an AC load — 97 hours of a router, 15 hours of a refrigerator, 32 minutes of a space heater. But what it will run at all is set by the inverter, not the battery, and three units sold as “1000Wh” ship inverters of 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 W.
“1000Wh” is the number on the box and it answers only half the question. It tells you how long something runs. It says nothing about whether the thing will start — and on this class of unit that second answer varies by a factor of two between products with the same capacity. If you have not chosen a capacity yet, start with our power station sizing guide; this article is about what one particular size actually does.
The number the label leaves out
Watt-hours are stored energy. Watts are the rate the inverter can deliver it. Three products sold in the 1,000 Wh class, taken from their makers’ own specification pages:
| Unit | Capacity | Continuous AC | Surge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jackery Explorer 1000 | 1,002 Wh | 1,000 W | not published on the page |
| Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 | 1,070 Wh | 1,500 W | 3,000 W |
| Goal Zero Yeti 1000 | 998.4 Wh | 2,000 W | 3,600 W |
Those three will run a router for the same length of time to within an hour. Put a 1,450 W coffee maker on them and the first one does nothing at all, at any state of charge, while the third runs it for half an hour. Same shelf, same headline number, different appliance list.
The runtime table
Every load below is a figure this site has verified from a certified dataset or a manufacturer document, not from another chart. Runtimes are 1,000 Wh multiplied by 0.8 — the share that actually reaches an AC socket — divided by the running watts.
| Load | Running | Runtime | Needs an inverter of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi router and modem | 8.22 W | 97 hours | any |
| CPAP, machine only | 11.2 W | 71 hours | any |
| Chest freezer, 9 cu ft | 23 W average | 35 hours | any; it has a compressor |
| Furnace blower, ECM low | 27 W | 30 hours | any |
| Refrigerator | 52.6 W average | 15 hours | any, but see surge |
| CPAP, humidifier and heated tube | 59.0 W | 14 hours | any |
| Window AC, 10–12k BTU | 750 W | 64 minutes | any |
| Coffee maker | 1,450 W | 33 minutes | 1,500 W or more |
| Space heater, high | 1,500 W | 32 minutes | 1,500 W or more |
| Microwave, 1,000 W class | 1,110–1,500 W input | 32–43 minutes | 1,500 W or more |
| Well pump, 1 HP | 1,210 W | — | will not start; see below |
What it will not start, and the one case nobody can promise
A motor asks for far more current in the instant it starts than it does running, and that demand has to clear the inverter’s surge rating, not its continuous one. Two of these are settled and one is not.
- A 1 HP well pump: no. Franklin publishes 48.7 A locked rotor at 230 V, which is 11,201 VA — three times the largest surge rating in the table above. Capacity is irrelevant here; nothing in this class starts it.
- A 1/2 HP sump pump: yes, on the bigger two. Liberty publishes 2,645 to 2,875 VA locked rotor, which clears both the 3,000 W and the 3,600 W surge ratings with room left.
- A refrigerator: probably, and no one can promise it. This is the honest answer and it is worth the paragraph below.
No refrigerator manufacturer publishes a starting figure for the finished appliance. The only published inrush numbers come from the compressor makers, and they run 3,146 to 4,626 VA. Set those against the surge ratings above and the arithmetic does not settle it: the range exceeds the 3,000 W unit outright and straddles the 3,600 W one.
That is not the same as saying it will fail. Locked-rotor figures are measured over seconds while inverter surge ratings are quoted for a much shorter window, the two are not measured the same way, and an inverter-driven compressor ramps up instead of slamming on. The same caveat covers a chest freezer, which has a compressor of its own that nobody publishes an inrush figure for either. It does mean that refrigeration is the one place on this list where you should read your own appliance’s rating plate rather than trust a table, including this one. Every page that flatly promises a 1,000 Wh station runs a fridge is comparing a number it has to a number nobody publishes.
How we calculated this
Runtimes are 1,000 Wh × 0.8 ÷ running watts. The 0.8 is our planning figure, not a manufacturer’s: it comes from the runtimes one maker publishes for its own product, which imply 57 to 86 per cent delivered depending on the load, and it is optimistic below about 20 W where the inverter’s idle draw is a large share of the total. Real capacities in this class are 998 to 1,070 Wh, so a nominal 1,000 Wh is used throughout rather than any one product’s figure.
Every load figure comes from one of this site’s verified appliance articles — medians of ENERGY STAR certified records for the refrigerator and freezer, manufacturer data sheets for the CPAP, the pumps and the blower, and each carries its source there. The capacities and inverter ratings are quoted from the three manufacturers’ own product pages. No product was tested by us and none is recommended; the three appear because they publish the numbers this article compares. Our method is described at how we test.
Before you rely on this in an outage
A portable power station is a plug-in appliance. Do not wire one into your home’s circuits, and never feed a house through a wall socket — that is backfeeding and it can kill line workers. A transfer switch is electrician work.
If someone in the house depends on medical equipment, size it with the equipment supplier rather than from a table, and ask your network operator about its priority-restoration register.
Frequently asked questions
Will a 1000Wh power station run a refrigerator overnight?
On energy, comfortably: a certified refrigerator averages 52.6 W, which is about 15 hours from 800 usable watt-hours — less if its ice maker is running, which the overnight arithmetic works through. On starting, the only published figures are the compressor makers’ 3,146 to 4,626 VA, and they are not clearly inside the 3,000 to 3,600 W surge ratings these units publish. Plan on the energy being fine and check the surge against your own rating plate.
Is a 1000Wh power station the same as a 1000W station?
No, and the two get used interchangeably everywhere. Watt-hours are the size of the tank; watts are the size of the pipe. The units above hold 998 to 1,070 Wh — almost the same tank — behind pipes of 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 W. A listing that gives you only one of the two numbers has left out half the specification.
Can it run a space heater or a kettle?
Only if the inverter is 1,500 W or larger, and then for about half an hour. Resistive heat is the worst possible use of stored electricity: a 1,500 W heater empties the whole battery in 32 minutes. In an outage, layers and closing off rooms do more than any battery this size.
How many appliances can I run at once?
Add the running watts and stay under the continuous rating; add nothing for surge except the single largest starting figure, because motors do not start in unison. A router, a fridge and a CPAP together draw about 120 W, which is inside every unit here and lasts roughly six and a half hours. The trap is not the arithmetic of running watts, it is the gap between starting and running.
The short version
A 1,000 Wh station is a very good answer to a small always-on load and a poor one to anything that makes heat: four days of a router, a day and a half of a chest freezer, fifteen hours of a refrigerator, half an hour of a heater. Before you compare capacities, find the continuous and surge watts — on this shelf they vary by twice as much as the capacity does, and they are what decides whether the thing you bought it for switches on at all.
This article is general information, not an installation guide and not a substitute for a licensed electrician. Electrical work on a service panel, a transfer switch or a utility connection is regulated in most jurisdictions and normally requires a permit and an inspection. Fuel-burning equipment produces carbon monoxide and must never be run indoors, in a garage or near an opening into the home.
