tonyclifton wrote:
My microwave is an inverter style, or at least says so on the front.
If this is an inverter MW, try lowering your power level setting on the MW.
Inverter MWs use a switching power supply instead of a transformer to power the magnetron tube. The advantage is they can simply reduce the voltage going to the magnetron which reduces the power drawn from the AC mains.
This is different from non inverter style MWs which had a big heavy transformer which the voltage to the magnetron could not be reduced and what was done for lower power levels was to turn on and off the magnetron in bursts (Full on then off, full on then off), changing the amount of time on verses the amount of time off.
The downside of lowering the power level is it will act like a lower wattage MW and take much longer to heat things up.
Try half power then work your way up towards 100%, you might find that 70%-80% may work OK.
Barring all that, if you are looking for a replacement gen, your going to need to get at least a 5,000W 120/240V gen and that is the absolute bare bottom which would supply 20.8A on each 120V leg which just may be enough to run your MW as wired now.
Personally, I would recommend for whole house setup, 6,500W would be a much better setup which would not require as much load managing Basically giving you 27A per 120V leg..
I run a 9000W gen on my whole home backup gen which at first I thought was overkill, but it handles my deep water well pump plus other high draw items at the same time very well.
The downside to bigger is they use more fuel and they are one heck of a lot noisier.
