Now, you need to be a bit careful here. You will notice that cooling and heating power are listed in the specifications. These are not the figures you’ re looking for. They describe the capacity of the airconditioner’ s output and bear no relation to electrical power consumption.
The figure you’ re interested in is the power consumption in cooling mode, which is shown as 4.2A. To convert this to watts, you will need to use Watt’ s Law, which states: Volts x Amps = Watts. In this case, the equation is 240V x 4.2A = 1008W.
So if you have a Truma Aventa Comfort air-conditioner on your caravan, your generator must be able to support a continuous load of at least 1008W.
Let’ s look at another example. The Dometic Ibis 4 is another very popular air-conditioner. Looking at its specifications, it lists its current draw( just another way of expressing power consumption) as 2.2-8A. You may ask why there is a variance for this unit when the Truma lists a single figure. The simple answer is that the Dometic Ibis features a‘ soft start’ function. We will talk about this a bit further on. For now, we just need to focus on the highest figure of 8A. We will use Watts Law once again to determine the power consumption in watts: 240V x 8A = 1920W. That is nearly double the Truma’ s consumption figure and will mean we potentially need a higher capacity generator to run it.
Generators come in all shapes and sizes.
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