I have a craftsman 2.0 hp 6 gallon wet dry vac. I need to power it with a portable gasoline electric generator?

I need to know what is the smallest type of generator in terms of watts that I need to power it

Comments

3 Responses to “I have a craftsman 2.0 hp 6 gallon wet dry vac. I need to power it with a portable gasoline electric generator?”
  1. zeppietkd says:
    March 12, 2010 at 3:04 pm

    one horsepower is equivalent to 746 watts. so you should use a minimum of 1500 watts for the generator.
    If you haven’t bought the generator yet you can save some money and buy a DC/AC converter for your car. you plug it into the cigarette lighter or directly to the battery, then you can plug any two or three prong outlet into your car. your engine can work as a generator.

  2. Elvira Bah Humbug says:
    March 12, 2010 at 3:04 pm

    You’ll need a 1000w generator. The little Hondas are good- mine has lasted a long time. It won’t run a hairdryer (hahaha) but it will run your shop-vac.

  3. colanth says:
    March 12, 2010 at 3:04 pm

    2HP is about 1500 watts. Drawing that from a car battery – assuming no losses – would take about 125 amps. Car batteries aren’t designed to handle that kind of drain for more than a few seconds. And good luck finding a 1500 watt inverter. Wiring it correctly is a totally different matter. You’d need a few #0000 wires (0.46" diameter each) for each leg – positive and negative. Four of them (on each side) would be good for about 2" between the battery terminal and the inverter (that would give you just about 1volt drop, which is about twice what you want).

    IOW, scratch that.

    A 2kw generator would probably hold up – vacuums don’t start under load, so the starting current shouldn’t be too high, but make sure you fuse the line with a fast-blow fuse, or a piece of paper sucked into the intake hose could fry the winding on the generator. Those little home generators are tape-wound, and that overheats almost instantly when you overload the generator – if the fuse doesn’t pop, the winding does, and you buy a new generator. An industrial generator can handle an overload for a few seconds (and a slow-blow fuse blows fast enough, but won’t blow for a short transient overload), but they cost 3-5 times as much.