How many hours will a 7000 watt generator run....

SaltiDawg wrote:
Oh, I understand the principle of hotel loads on a generator... including its own mechanical losses at low load.

That said, I believe the run time at 500 Watts will be much closer to the idealistic four days than your 16 hours.

However, my experience was on steam turbine generators, motor-generator battery/450Volt AC, and Diesel generators.... all operated in parallel. (
and occasionally A/C Shore Power.

Not much experience with small gasoline powered generators, so my intuition may be severely off, probably shouldn't have posted.

Be interested if the OP noted how much fuel he actually used overnight???

PS. Yes, I realize that my post would make the argument that were there no electrical load that it would run forever on a tankful. lol

Diesel and gas.. two different birds..

Example, my old 8hp Kohler in a 1966 Jacobsen tractor uses about 2 gallons of gas per hr mowing. Contrast that to my 26HP diesel tractor using 3/4 gallon of fuel per hr..

The Kohler 8HP had to run at 3600 RPM to do the same work as my 26HP diesel tractor running at 2200 RPM..

Diesel contains considerably more energy than gasoline and a diesel engine has considerably more compression to squeeze out more efficiency..

So, displacement, energy in fuel and RPM all make a difference in how much fuel will be used..

My 4Kw gas gen has a 4 gallon fuel tank, runs about 12hrs per tank and that is with than less half load.. More than half load that is about 11 hrs per tank full..

OP will never see anywhere near 96hrs of run time per tank with a 7Kw gen which has at least 13HP engine..

Pretty familiar with gas gen run times..