Our power was down at work all day today, probably will be again tomorrow. We have a mishmash of generators, including my Champions that I brought from home.
The Champions ran great. I ran into issues with an 8000 watt Troy Built.
We have 3 Magic Chef cheap microwaves in the break room. Looking at the labels and online specs, they say anywhere from 1000 to 1100 watts.
There are 2 circuits on this machine, but no matter how I ran the cords (12ga), it would kick out the breakers. I could only run one microwave at a time.
I figured there was something wrong with the generator, but it would run some stuff. After break I hooked it to a refrigerator (7.1 amp load) and it ran fine.
A while later, I heard the small air compressor kick on and was trying to figure out how my employees were running it. I walked out to the warehouse, and sure enough, my employees have connected a 10 amp pancake compressor to the same generator and are beating the hell out of it with a pneumatic carton closer stapler.
So the generator is handling 17 amps now, but couldn’t handle a couple of microwaves 30 minutes earlier? And all on the same cords!!!
So is there something in particular to microwaves that make them screw with the load on a generator? Are their loads higher than specified? Do they spike the voltage or something?
Kinda has got me stumped.