#USED ROTARY AIR COMPRESSOR 3.5 AMPS 115 VOLTS FULL#
Compressors are “hard starting” which means the starting amps are over double the full load amps listed on the motor. Sometimes it’s just a 15 amp breaker (1800 watts or 2.4 hp).
Watts = volts x amps, so the biggest motor you can run on that plug is 2400 watts. The plug in your wall is on a 20 amp breaker and it’s a 120V circuit. Go to Home Depot and Lowes, and you might see compressors that plug into your wall that say 5hp or 6.5hp. This creative horsepower labeling is extremely common consumer world. It doesn’t tell you what’s going on with the other components.
Additionally the hp rating only tells you rating of one component of the package. However, the advertised hp can be creatively altered by manufacturers to show what they want it to show, and more often than not that is the case. Horsepower is a number assigned by a manufacturer to represent how much power the engine or motor can deliver. Horsepower (hp) is not an accurate way to size an air compressor. When you ask for a compressor based on horsepower, what you are doing is very similar to pharmacy situation described above. Several times per day, we have a customer that asks us for a compressor in a certain horsepower. That seems a little ridiculous, but we see this every day in the world of air compressors. So you grab the cheapest medicine on the shelf that comes in 250mg pills, and you confidently walk out of the store with Viagra, even though you have a fever. “That doesn’t matter….just give me the cheapest one that comes in 250mg pills,” you respond. The pharmacist then asks you, “What type of medicine? Do you want aspirin, Tylenol, NyQuil, Claritin, or maybe some antacid? What are your symptoms?”