The short answer: a typical refrigerator uses 1,000 to 1,500Wh a day, so the Jackery HomePower 3000 and its 3,072Wh battery runs one for two to three days with nothing else plugged in. The HomePower 3600 Plus at 3,584Wh runs one for two and a half to three and a half days. The Solar Generator 5000 Plus at 5,040Wh runs one for three to five days.
Add the rest of the usual essentials, Wi-Fi, a few lights, and phones, and those numbers become about a day and a half, a day and a half to two days, and two to two and a half days. Sun adds to every one of them. Here is the arithmetic.
Why a fridge uses far less than its label suggests
The number stuck to the inside of the door, or the one on the box, is a nameplate rating. It describes the worst moment the appliance can have, not the way it behaves all day.
A refrigerator’s compressor does not run continuously. It runs for a few minutes, brings the box back down to temperature, and then stops until the temperature drifts up again. While it is running, a typical family fridge draws about 150W. Averaged across a full day of cycling on and off, that comes to roughly 1,000 to 1,500Wh.
That distinction is the whole reason a fridge is such a friendly load for a battery. If it really drew 150W for 24 hours it would need 3,600Wh a day and no unit in this guide would run it for even one full day. Because it cycles, a 3,000Wh-class battery carries it comfortably into a third day.
Runtime, unit by unit
Every figure below is on the battery alone, with no solar coming in. A fridge is counted at 1,200Wh a day, the middle of the range. Essentials means Wi-Fi at about 10W, ten LED bulbs at about 50W for an evening, and phones and a laptop, which together come to roughly 900Wh a day.
| Load | Energy per day | HomePower 3000 (3,072Wh) | HomePower 3600 Plus (3,584Wh) | 5000 Plus (5,040Wh) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fridge alone | 1,000 to 1,500Wh | 2 to 3 days | 2.5 to 3.5 days | 3 to 5 days |
| Fridge plus essentials | ~2,100Wh | About 1.5 days | 1.5 to 2 days | 2 to 2.5 days |
| Fridge plus chest freezer | ~2,000Wh | About 1.5 days | About 1.75 days | 2 to 2.5 days |
| Fridge, freezer, essentials | ~2,900Wh | About 1 day | About 1.25 days | About 1.75 days |
The two expandable units change the picture if you buy battery packs with them. The HomePower 3600 Plus grows to 21kWh, which is about 17 days of a fridge on its own. The 5000 Plus grows to 60kWh, which is more than a month of one.
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Show the working
The sum is short enough to do on the back of an envelope, and doing it yourself beats trusting anyone’s chart.
Take the capacity of the unit and divide it by the watt-hours your fridge uses in a day. A 3,072Wh unit divided by 1,200Wh a day is 2.5 days. If your fridge is an older, larger, or side-by-side model at the top of the range, use 1,500Wh: 3,072 divided by 1,500 is just over two days. If it is a small, modern, well-sealed unit at 1,000Wh a day, you get just over three days.
Then subtract everything else you intend to plug in. Wi-Fi at 10W all day is about 240Wh. Ten LED bulbs at 50W for six hours is 300Wh. Phones and a laptop are 150 to 300Wh. That is roughly 900Wh a day of company for the fridge, and it is why “fridge plus essentials” lands near 2,100Wh and cuts the runtime to about a day and a half.
How to stretch it
Three habits do more for runtime than any spec on the box.
Keep the fridge full. A full box holds its cold between compressor cycles far better than an empty one, because the food itself is the thermal mass. Jugs of water fill the gaps in a half-empty fridge and a half-empty freezer for free.
Keep the door shut. Every opening dumps cold air onto the floor and pulls warm air in, and the compressor has to make all of that back. This is the single largest variable in real outages, and it is entirely under your control.
Put the things you reach for often in a cooler. Drinks, snacks, the milk for coffee, anything that gets grabbed five times a day belongs in a cooler with ice beside the fridge. That one move can keep the fridge door shut for hours at a stretch, and it is worth more than a couple of hundred watt-hours of battery.
What a chest freezer adds
A chest freezer uses 600 to 900Wh a day, less than a fridge, because it opens from the top so the cold air stays put when the lid comes up, and because it is usually packed solid.
Running a fridge and a chest freezer together means budgeting about 2,000Wh a day, which is roughly a day and a half on a HomePower 3000 and two to two and a half days on a 5000 Plus. There is a cheaper option worth knowing: a full chest freezer stays frozen for a long time unopened with no power at all, so many households leave it unplugged for the first day of an outage and give the battery to the fridge, which cannot coast that way.
How solar changes the answer by season
This is where a solar generator stops being a big battery and starts being a system.
A set of panels in good sun returns 1,500 to 2,000Wh on a bright summer day. A fridge uses 1,000 to 1,500Wh a day. In summer, the panels cover the fridge and then some, so the battery is only carrying the overnight hours and the runtime stops being a countdown. That is the reason a hurricane-season outage on a sunny coast can run for days on a 3,000Wh-class unit.
A grey winter day returns a few hundred watt-hours. That covers a quarter to a third of a fridge’s daily use, so it stretches a two-and-a-half-day runtime to about three and a half days. Useful, not transformative. Plan winter outages on the battery figure and treat the sun as a bonus, and top the unit up from the grid before a forecast storm arrives.
The start surge, and why any of these handles it
Motors draw more current to start than to run, and a fridge compressor is a motor. Each time it kicks in it pulls a spike well above its 150W running draw. The spike is brief but real, and it is the reason a very small power station can trip when a fridge cycles on.
None of the three units here has that problem. The HomePower 3000 and the HomePower 3600 Plus both deliver 3,600W, and the 5000 Plus delivers 7,200W. A fridge starting while the lights, the router and a laptop are already running is nowhere near those limits. Our full HomePower 3000 review goes through the same loads hour by hour over a two-day outage.
What happens to the food
The standard advice is the right advice, and it is short: keep the door shut. A fridge holds its temperature for hours unopened, and a full freezer holds much longer than that. Every unnecessary opening spends both the cold and the battery.
If the outage runs past what your unit can carry, decide early rather than late. Move what matters into the freezer, which stays cold longer, or into a cooler with ice. When you are not sure whether something has stayed cold enough, throw it out. Food safety guidance from your local health authority is the place to check the specifics, not a battery review.
Who needs to size up
The HomePower 3000 is the right unit for most households asking this question, because a fridge alone or a fridge with the usual essentials is exactly what it was built for. Three situations point elsewhere.
- Outages longer than two days in winter. Grey skies mean little solar, and a fridge plus essentials is a day and a half. The HomePower 3600 Plus with an expansion pack turns that into a week.
- A furnace blower, a window AC, or a sump pump on the same unit. Those are 3,000 to 8,000Wh a day loads, and they dwarf the fridge. Start at the 3600 Plus and read our home backup buying guide.
- A well pump, central AC, or anything on 240V. The HomePower 3000 and the 3600 Plus are 120V only. The Solar Generator 5000 Plus delivers 7,200W on both 120V and 240V.
If you are not sure which group you are in, work through how to size a solar generator for home backup and add up your own watt-hours before you spend anything.
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Keep reading: Best solar generators for home backup · How to size a solar generator for home backup · Jackery HomePower 3000 review