The Ultimate Guide to Powering Your Party Rental Equipment

Disclaimer

We are not sponsored by or personally recommending any specific item in this post. Anything mentioned is only here as a convenient example.

Intro

Dealing with electrical equipment can be intimidating if you lack experience. The stakes are also high for you and your business. Improper use of a generator or cable can lead to a poor customer experience, bad reviews, and even injury. In this article, we’re going to make sure you know how to power your events effectively and safely.

Step by Step

Here are the steps you need to take to know that you’ll be powering all your blowers and other equipment correctly. Don’t worry if any of these terms are unfamiliar. We’ll be going through each step in detail and finishing with an example. Note that steps 1 and 2 can be swapped depending on which one is easier to find for the device.

1. Find the running watts for each device

2. Find the starting/surge watts for each device

3. Make sure the totals from steps 1 and 2 are 80% or less of the listed capacities of your generator

4. Make sure your cables are the correct gauge and length to carry the amperage your devices need.

Finding the Running Watts

Generators most often list their capacity in watts. So we need to figure out how many watts each of our devices will use. Unfortunately, not every device will conveniently list its’ wattage. Some will only list volts and amps while others will list horsepower. Here is how you find the wattage of the device given the other numbers.

• Volts x Amps = Watts

• Horsepower x 746 = Watts (can also use 750 for easier math)

So a 2 horsepower blower’s wattage is 1492 watts or 1500 for convenience.

Finding the Starting Watts

The “starting” or “surge” watts refers to when a device uses more watts than normal when first starting up. This is especially common for anything with a motor like blowers. Some manufacturers will list this in an obvious way. If they don’t list their start/surge usage, then it’s a bit of a guessing game. Some devices will list a usage range that’s higher than their listed wattage. You can use the highest point of that range to find the surge/start.

Using the Right Cable

The right cable for the job depends on how far you need it to reach and how many amps the equipment needs. This is because the amps that a cable can “push” go down over distance. So the same gauge(thickness) of cable has higher amp capacity when its 50ft long than when it’s 100ft. This is true whether you’re using one 100ft cable or 4 25ft cables strung together. Menards has a handy picture you can reference on their website. If you know you need to go past 100ft then use the image found at this website.

To know which cable is the right one, first find the listed amps a device uses, then figure out how far from the power source its going to be, finally compare that against either of the earlier links. A rule of thumb you can use to keep things simple is to use 12-gauge cables that are 100ft or less. This should cover most situations.

Putting It All Together

Now let’s work through an example. You have a good sized event coming up this weekend. Assume you’re using this generator. We can see it has a listed running capacity of 5500W and a starting capacity of 6500W. We want to shoot for 80% usage or less which is 5500 x 0.8 or 4400W for the running capacity and 5200W for the starting capacity.

For the equipment you need to power, assume you’re going to use two Predator blowers. We can see that the blower is listed as 2HP or about 1500W. But is that the running watts or the starting/surge watts? If we scroll down to the specifications, we can see the “Start Up” amps are 13A and the Voltage is 115V. Using our equation from earlier we find 13 * 115 = 1495W which is basically the same as the listed 2HP. So we have our total “Starting Watts” which is about 3000W.

Next we need the “Running Watts”. In the same specs we see a listed running amperage of 12A. So the “Running Watts” for one of these blowers is 12 * 115 = 1380W and our total is about 2760W.

Now we make sure our generator has enough capacity. Our Starting Watts of 3000W is much less than the 5200W our generator can safely supply so we’re good there. Our Running Watts of 2760W is also much less than our 80% usage benchmark of 4400W. We even have enough room to add a third blower if we need to.

Finally, what kind of cables do we need? For the sake of the example, let’s assume the blowers have to be 125ft from your generator. We know our blowers need 13A to start and 12A to run. We also can see in the description that they have a 14-gauge 25ft power cord. If we look at the Menards link from earlier, we know that this power cable will only push 15A. After referencing both of our diagrams, it looks like 14-gauge starts to drop below 13A after 100ft. So we’ll take a 100ft 12-gauge extension cable and use that.

Now you’re ready to power your event safely and effectively.

Conclusion

For most events, you won’t need to go into as much detail as we did here. But if you ever have any doubts, you now know how to figure out if your generator and cables are up to the job. This way, you can ensure everything runs smoothly and safely.