How long will a portable power station run an air conditioner?

Short answer: a few hours at most, and only from a big station. An LG LW8017ERSM 8,000 BTU window AC window unit on an EcoFlow DELTA 2 works out to about 1.3 hours of cooling at its rated power. On the EcoFlow DELTA Pro, the biggest station in our data, it’s 4.5 hours. That gets you through the hot part of an afternoon. The small EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus can’t run either LG unit at all.

The startup surge we can’t check

An air conditioner runs on a compressor, and compressors pull a burst of power when they start that’s well above their running draw. Neither LG nor EcoFlow publishes a startup figure for these units. So when a table below says a station can run one, it means the station can carry the rated running power. It doesn’t mean we’ve checked the start. Every passing row is marked “surge unverified”, and here that label matters more than anywhere else on the site.

It matters most on stations whose manuals don’t give a surge rating. For the EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus and the Bluetti Elite 200 V2, we found no surge figure, so we treat their surge limit as equal to their continuous limit. In other words, we assume they have no extra room for a compressor start. A station with a published surge rating well above its continuous rating is the safer bet for an air conditioner, though we can’t tell you how much margin is enough without a startup figure from the maker.

Where these numbers come from

The LG figures are the rated cooling watts from LG’s spec sheets. The EcoFlow figures come from the WAVE manuals’ spec tables, which give a rated input for cooling and a separate maximum cooling power. We show both for the WAVE units.

We use the rated draw as if the compressor ran the whole time. Once the space is down to temperature the compressor can cycle off, so in milder weather you may get more hours than the table. In a closed van in full sun, don’t count on it.

Everything here is calculated, not measured. We take the station’s rated capacity, apply an AC efficiency factor (our assumption, printed under each table) and divide by the rated draw. We haven’t run any of these units on these stations.

The WAVE units can also take DC power through EcoFlow’s own battery connection, which isn’t the 12V car port and which we don’t model. These tables are for the AC outlet only.

Runtime by unit

We picked five stations from small to very large. The runtime calculator has the rest, and the WAVE heating modes as well.

LG LW8017ERSM 8,000 BTU window AC

The smaller of the two LG units. Its rated draw is just over the EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus inverter limit, so that station is out. Every mid-size and large station here can carry its running power, with the startup caveat above.

LG LW1017ERSM 10,000 BTU window AC

More cooling, more draw, fewer hours. On a kilowatt-hour class station that’s about an hour.

EcoFlow WAVE 2

The WAVE 2’s rated cooling input is the only figure on this page that fits under the EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus inverter limit. On paper, that station runs it. In practice it’s the pairing we’d trust least. The runtime is short, the River 3 Plus is one of the stations with no published surge rating, and at maximum cooling the WAVE 2 is over the limit anyway.

EcoFlow WAVE 3

The WAVE 3’s rated cooling input is close to its maximum, so its two rows per station barely differ. It’s over the River 3 Plus limit in both.

Which size to get

If air conditioning is the main job, think about the biggest station you can justify, like the EcoFlow DELTA Pro, and still treat it as a few hours of cooling, not a night. A mid-size station like the EcoFlow DELTA 2 gives you about an hour or two. Whichever station you look at, check its surge rating against what your unit’s maker says about starting current, and if the maker says nothing, ask them before you buy.

To run cooling for longer, you’ll need a way to recharge while it runs. Our solar recharge calculator shows how long a refill takes, and it’s worth seeing how that compares with what an air conditioner uses in an afternoon.