Battery & storage
Enter your stove's peak wattage and how much cumulative cooking time you actually need. Get a battery size based on real usage, not continuous draw.
How it works
Step 1
This is the highest draw when burners and oven run together, not an average, similar to the surge figures in the whole home backup tool.
Step 2
Total actual cooking minutes across a day is much less than 24 hours of continuous running.
Step 3
The battery inverter pairing tool checks whether your inverter can supply the stove's peak draw.
An electric stove drawing 3,000 watts sounds like a major backup power commitment, but total energy consumption depends on cumulative cooking time, not the peak wattage figure alone. Most U.S. households use their stovetop 4 to 7 times a week according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's residential energy survey, and a household cooking for 1.5 cumulative hours a day only consumes about 4.5 kWh of usable energy, keeping the actual battery requirement well under a single unit, even though the instantaneous draw while cooking is substantial.
While total daily energy use stays modest, the inverter needs to supply the stove's full peak wattage the moment multiple burners and the oven run simultaneously, which can reach 3,000 to 5,000 watts or more. This makes the inverter's continuous power rating the real constraint for electric stove backup, not the battery's total kWh capacity, a distinction explained in the Department of Energy's inverter basics guide. The battery inverter pairing tool checks whether a specific inverter can handle this kind of sustained high-wattage draw.
A gas stove with a standing pilot light, or one that can be lit manually with a match or lighter, can typically be used during a power outage with no electricity at all, since the cooking heat itself comes from gas combustion rather than electric resistance. This gives gas cooking an inherent backup advantage that electric stoves, entirely dependent on electricity for every burner and oven function, don't share, a gap the whole home backup tool covers for full-comfort scenarios. Households weighing whether to keep a gas connection specifically for this resilience benefit, versus going fully electric, may find the quick financing comparison tool in our Financing category useful for comparing the tradeoffs.
Once you know your stove's battery requirement, the partial home backup tool is the essential next step to confirm your inverter can actually deliver the peak power this appliance demands. The inverter's surge capacity for this specific load is covered in the surge capacity calculator in our Inverters & Equipment category.
Questions
A 3,000 watt electric stove used for a cumulative 1.5 hours of actual cooking time in a day needs about 5.4 kWh of nameplate capacity, under half a battery, since cooking time is much shorter than a full day even though the stove itself draws significant power while in use.
An electric stove or range can draw 2,000 to 5,000 watts or more when multiple burners and the oven are running together, which is a large continuous load for an inverter to supply even though it doesn't require much total energy across a full day. The inverter needs to be sized to this instantaneous draw, not just the smaller daily energy total.
A gas stove with a standing pilot light or manual ignition can often be lit and used during a power outage without any electricity at all, making it inherently more resilient than an electric stove, which requires power for every burner and oven function.
Yes, using one burner at a time instead of running the full stovetop and oven simultaneously significantly reduces both the instantaneous power draw your inverter needs to supply and the total energy consumed, making backup cooking more manageable on a smaller system.
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