Will a 200Ah Battery Run an Air Fryer?

The 200Ah LiFePO4 deep cycle battery is a great choice for powering your appliances while off-grid. Most appliances that have a heating element will require a lot of power to run an air fryer is no exception. So can a 200Ah battery run an air fryer?

A 200Ah battery can run an air fryer at the max temperature for around 15 minutes and leave enough juice to run other appliances off the battery. 

Power for an Air Fryer

Any appliance that has a heating element is a high-wattage appliance. Most air fryers in our homes can go up to 1800 Watts. These are similar power requirements to an electric kettle or stove. The amount of time it takes to cook your food also dictates the amount of power used. 

Air fryers have different settings for different temperatures and recommended lengths of time to cook certain foods. For meat, you’ll need to cook at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 mins, for chicken you’ll need 20 mins. 

Air Fryer Watt-Hour Requirements 

Electrical energy is measured in Watt-Hours. The amount of time you run an appliance determines how much power it uses.

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 an air fryer for 1 hour, you will need 1800 Wh of energy. 

How Many Amps for an Air Fryer 

To get the number of amps the Inverter will draw from the battery in order to power the Air Fryer you divide the Watts by the voltage of the system.  An 1800-watt air fryer will need around 15.00 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 air fryer will be drawing through the inverter.

For a 12v system 

1800W/12v = 150 amps

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.

The 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 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 their 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 Power an Air Fryer

As we’ve seen above it almost looks impossible to run the air fryer with a 200Ah battery. With a 150 amp draw, this is almost equal to the capacity of the battery and way beyond the 40 amps per hour requirement. However, this does not mean that we cannot run the air fryer with the battery.

We already know the battery can support 480 watts but we need 1800 watts for the air fryer to run for an hour. So how long is 480 watts? 

(480/1800) = 0.27 hrs 

In minutes 0.27 x 60 = 16.2 minutes 

A 200Ah 12v battery will run an air fryer for 16 minutes. This is without any other appliance drawing power from the battery. As stated before there are different settings and times on an air fryer for different foods. From what we’ve calculated as the requirements for an hour we can estimate the power needed to run the air fryer for other periods of time. 16 minutes is enough to cook some chicken tenders on the air fryer. This is almost the same time as with an electric oven.

Conclusion

Batteries are not designed to be depleted over a short period of time. Most solar batteries are labeled deep cycle and are intended to be used over a 20-hour period max.  But with LiFePo4 batteries, it is possible to stretch these limits as they have a 1C C rating which means you can discharge the whole battery at once. This is not recommended however but a 50% discharge in one hour is possible.  So if we were to use a 24v 300Ah LiFePO4 battery bank (or more) it can support the 75 amps draw from the air fryer for one hour of use. 

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