A 200Ah Battery is a high-quality and reliable off-grid power solution that can provide continuous energy to electrical appliances while off the grid. A hairdryer requires a lot of power to run and may not be considered an essential item. But can you run it off a 200Ah battery?

A 200Ah battery can run a 1500-watt hair dryer for up to 19 minutes. This is with extra capacity in the battery to spare. 

In this article, we show you how we arrive at this number and what else you can run off your 200Ah battery.

Power for a Hair Dryer

The wattage of a hair dryer indicates how much electricity is needed to run the device. The most common hair dryers use between 1,200 watts and 2,400 watts. The average wattage for a dryer is 1,500 watts. Some professional-grade dryers have wattages as high as 3,000 or 4,000 watts. 

Hair Dryer Watt-hour Requirement

Electrical energy is measured in watt-hours. One watt-hour equals one watt expended for one hour. The number of watt-hours used by an appliance over a period of time equals the total amount of power consumed by that device over that period. 

To calculate watt-hours, multiply the watts used by an appliance over a period of time by the number of hours that appliance is used. If you use a hair dryer for an hour, it will consume about 1500 watt-hours. 

How Many Amps do you need for the Hair Dryer?

A 1500-watt hair dryer will need around 12.5 amps to run when using it from the standard 120V outlet. This is the number of amps that it will be drawing from the inverter. Depending on the DC voltage of the inverter you can calculate the number of amps the hair dryer will be drawing through the inverter.

To find the number of amps you need from the battery you divide the watt by the voltage.

In the case, you have a 12-volt system, so you divide 1500 Watts by 12V. 

1500/12 = 125 Amps

You’ll need a battery that can safely pull 125 amps (huge amps). Depending on the power factor of the inverter may need more than this. 

So can a 200Ah battery support 125 amps?

How Many Amps can you draw from a 200Ah battery?

Amp-hour rating in batteries gives the charge in amps that can be drawn from a battery over a specific time given in hours.

A Deep Cycle Battery battery is intended to produce the charge for a long period of time like 20 hours. So for a 200 Ah battery, it should produce at least 10 amps over a 20-hour period. 

However, you can go higher or lower depending on the appliance you are using.  Deep cycle batteries are recommended to be discharged at 20% of their capacity so for a 200 Ah battery the max discharge per hour would be 40 amps meaning it can last 5 hours.

For lead acid batteries, this can be lower as they can only be discharged up to half their capacity meaning it’s only 100Ah of its capacity that is usable. This means it can last only  2.5 hours when discharged at 40 amps and 5 hours at 20 amps and 10 hours at 10 amps.

How many watt-hours is a 200 Ah Battery 

You can use the following formula to determine how many watts can be drawn from a battery.

Watts = Volts x Amps

So if your battery is 12v and has a 200 Ah capacity, then you can draw 2400 Watts from it. This is for the full battery cycle. With the 40 amps max draw it means you can get 480 watts max per hour. You can push this to 50 amps or 600 watts per hour with LiFePO4 batteries. 

How Long Will a 200Ah Battery Run a 1500-Watt Hair Dryer?

We’ve already concluded that you can draw a max of 40 amps per hour or 480 watts for a 200Ah battery.  Our hair dryer will need to draw up to 125 amps. So our 200Ah battery will not be able to support the hair dryer for a full hour. 

However, you may not need to run a hair dryer for a full hour in order to dry your hair a couple of minutes may be enough. 

We already know the battery can support 480 watts but we need 1500 watts for the hairdryer to run for an hour. So how long for 480 watts? 

(480/1500) = 0.32 hrs

In minutes 0.32 x 60 = 19.2 minutes

A 200Ah 12v battery will run a hair dryer for 19 minutes. This is without any other appliance drawing power from the battery. 

Note that this will leave some extra capacity that you can use to run other appliances off the battery. 

Conclusion

Most hair dryers have three settings: low, medium, and high. The higher the setting, the more energy it uses. You’ll use less power if you set the temperature to low or medium. The best way to save power when using a hair dryer is to use it in cold air mode.