New Central AC Unit – Do any include soft/start

Curious,

I’ll be in the market to replace both of my home central air units in the near future. I don’t want to invest in soft-start kits for the ones I have now if I can’t use those kits in the new ones.

So my question…. do any newer central air units already include soft start kits (or something that works similarly) so that they’ll work well with portable backup generators?

Thanks!

Only ones I know that will do that from the factory are Inverter driven units.

Any specific models?

For what it’s worth, I plan to use an inverter generator.

I the generator primary power supply?

If not, how often are you expecting to use the generator?

What size generator? Not familiar with an inverter generator large enough to supply enough power for 1 ac, let alone 2, and household load at the same time.

Originally Posted by pacnw

I the generator primary power supply?

If not, how often are you expecting to use the generator?

What size generator? Not familiar with an inverter generator large enough to supply enough power for 1 ac, let alone 2, and household load at the same time.

Not primary, just backup… maybe 4 times per year.

https://www.championpowerequipment.c…ith-co-shield/

Get 1 or 2 window units.

Not enough power to start central air.

Okay here’s my thought and inverter air conditioner naturally soft starts but I would never want to run an expensive inverter AC on anything but the most expensive oversized generators. So my recommendation would be to get a standard single stage base model unit and install a soft start. It’s no guarantee that something won’t go wrong but it does it’s going to be a lot cheaper to fix.
Personally growing up off grid running everything on generators or inverters it’s not that bad but we never tried to run an air conditioner we just ran things like welders air compressors washing machines and all kinds of power tools I think an air conditioner would be much more gentle on the generator because it only starts ideally once every hour or two where is the skill saw starts usually seconds or minutes apart. Just know that if it breaks from running on the generator that’s on you don’t expect warranty coverage. Personally that would not deter me at all if I want to run my unit on a generator I understand the risks and I’m going to do it.
My final thought is get a real generator. Personally I wouldn’t have anything less than a Honda. A Generac or Kohler would be fine too but why bother with some cheap machine that probably won’t last 50 hours. Buy once cry once. Our Honda generators lasted a minimum of 2000 hours and usually closer to 4000+ and 15 to 25 years of daily operation without major repairs. I used a champion or something like that from a hardware store and it lasted around 50 hours before the bearings in the generator went bad.

Originally Posted by wjmena

What others have said, and @ 4 times a year live without ac.

Look at the specs and tell me where you see the ability of this unit to run 1 ac(size of the ac does matter) let alone 2 and then whatever you want to use in the house.
Presume, because you want to run the ac in a power outage, you can’t live without the other creature comforts you would probably need 2 of these generators.