A 200Ah battery is an ideal size for powering small-to-medium appliances. Making toast is not a luxury just when you are connected to the grid. You can still enjoy some toast running a toaster off a 200Ah battery.
A 200Ah battery can run a toaster for up to 30 minutes. You may not need this long and the good news is that you can hook other appliances on the system on the same charge.
We tell you more in the article.
Toaster Power Consumption
A typical household toaster is rated at around 900 watts. Toasters come in different wattages, with higher wattages meaning that the appliance uses more power.
Toaster Energy Requirement
When you are determining how much energy a device uses, you must consider the amount of time that it will be used. A Watt-hour is a product of multiplying a device’s wattage by its run time in hours. To calculate Watt-Hours you multiply the Wattage of the device or appliance and multiply by the number of hours you use the device.
Watt-Hours = Watts X Hours
If you want to use a 900-watt toaster for 1 hour, you will need 900Wh of energy.
This number is important in figuring out how long the battery will run the toaster and if it has the capacity to do so.
How Many Amps Does 900-watt Toaster Draw?
The next thing we need to do is determine how many amps our toaster will be drawing from the battery through the inverter. A 900-watt toaster will need around 7.50 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 toaster will be drawing through the inverter.
To calculate the Amps required you divide the Wattage by the voltage. The voltage in a battery bank is usually between 12v and 24v depending on how you wire the system.
To find the size of the battery, you divide the watt-hours by the voltage. In this case, you have a 12-volt system, so you divide 900Wh by 12V and for the 24V system, you divide by 24V.
900/12 = 75 Amps
So let’s find out if our battery can support this.
What does 200 Amp-Hour Mean
Amp-hour rating in batteries gives the charge in amps that can be drawn from a battery over a specific time given in hours.
Amp-Hour) rating of a battery can also be calculated by multiplying the rated capacity by its terminal voltage. But this does not represent the real-world performance of batteries.
A Deep Cycle 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 900-watt Toaster?
We already know the battery can support 480 watts but we need 900 watts for the toaster to run for an hour. So how long is 480 watts?
(480/900) = 0.53 hrs
In minutes 0.53 x 60 = 31.8 minutes
A 200Ah 12v battery will run a toaster for 31.8 minutes. This is without any other appliance drawing power from the battery. This however will not deplete the battery and you can hook other appliances. A 1000-watt microwave will run for the same amount of time off the battery.
Conclusion
A 200Ah battery is enough to run your toaster for 30 minutes however you may not need this long to toast your bread. 15 minutes can be enough. If you run a toaster for 15 minutes a 100 Ah LiFePO4 12v battery will be able to support it. However, you should not hook up many high-wattage appliances at once.