Power went out on a nice Saturday afternoon around 3:50pm. So I fired up the generator. I then took the liberty to experiment with it and see how it could handle whole-house A/C loads. So I wheeled it out, started it up, connected the cord, flipped the dryer breaker off, flipped the main off and flipped the generator feed breaker on. In eco mode. It did great.
The initial load was fairly high. This was 3 mini split zones (3 tons of condenser between two units), plus an 8,000 BTU window A/C, two refrigerators, dehumidifier, TV lights. Pretty heavy load all things considered.
Then the water heater kicked on. Keep in mind the way to look at capacity would be to consider a max of 29A per leg. I think that's more accurate than looking at watts (although the power factor is really high here so watts would work, too). For watts, the theoretical max would be 3.5 kW per leg.
Then the load dropped quite a bit. I believe what happened is the mini-splits throttled themselves down, back to where they were before the outage. It was extremely humid, also.
Power came back after about 70 minutes and here is the total energy usage. About 2 kWh.
I wouldn't run the generator this hard in a prolonged outage but felt comfortable doing so here because I knew it would be fairly short. In other news, I now have 30 gallons of gas on hand which should give me a pretty easy 3 day continuous run time and in the real world, I would not run it this hard or full time and could get many more days out of it.
On the A/C side of things, the thing with the mini-splits is, they will draw quite a bit of power to cool things off and then lope along. So if I want A/C, I almost have to decide to run everything and bring the house down, or possibly use the zones I have to decide where cooling needs to happen. I could turn the great room off at night and with bedroom doors shut, the electricity usage wouldn't be too bad. But any overnight A/C use (or dehumidifier use) is going to seriously cut into my overnight runtime.