It’s plainly a mighty beast, capable of delivering 16 – 22 kW of continuous power, depending upon fuel type. That puts it up there with the typical Cummins, Generac or Kohler permanently installed standby generators.
Physical Reality
Except, of course, it’s not an installed standby generator. It’s a portable generator. I suspect the specification worth examining in this case is the weight. The XP28000 weights a whopping 466 pounds! That implies that it’s portable for some people, but as a practical matter, possibly not so portable for others.
In contrast, our Predator 9500 (and its kin) weight in at a more modest 257 pounds. It weighs enough that the Harbor Freight team loaded it into my SUV with a forklift. It just barely fit. When I got it home, I unloaded it by sliding it down a temporary ramp hastily crafted from some lumber I had on-hand.
Duromax is so far selling these XP28000 direct-to-consumer. That means they will be shipped to the buyers location. Expect a truck with some ability to offload it. Most likely a powered lift of some sort. Once it’s on the ground, you can remove the cardboard and get it off the palette, such that it will be on its own wheels.
The smaller Duromax XP9500iHT is a tri-fuel inverter more comparable to my Predator 9500. They are about the same size and weight. The XP9500 has two wheels on the front, with fixed legs on the back. That means that you must pickup a good portion of the weight to move around.
Not so the larger 16 kW and 28 kW models. They have four wheels because, there’s no way most people can pick up that much weight.
Still, I wonder if someone who buys one of these is going to want to move it around very much? I suspect they will cause a lot of people to consider a generator shed. Most especially folks who intend to run on natural gas. At that point, they’re starting to behave like an installed backup generator.
Electrical Reality
The big guy provides two 50A 240VAC plugs. As a practical matter you can only have one 50A inlet wired to your homes breaker panel. In our case, our garage is on a separate electrical service, with its own inlet. That being the case, an XP28000 could power both the house and the garage. Without breaking a sweat.
If someone had a house and large RV the situation might be similar.
Of course, for us this would be overkill. Our house never draws more than 6 kW and the garage even less. I suspect we’d be better serviced by a pair of smaller XP9500 inverters. That pair would be much cheaper than the XP28000. Also, the smaller units support connection in parallel for those times when they are both needed to service a large load.
Speaking of parallel, I learned from an animated Reddit thread that the XP28000 actually has two, separate inverter modules. The 999cc V-twin engine and mechanical generator are large enough to drive two 14 kW inverter modules. That explains how they are able to make the leap all the way to 28 kW.
Further, it has 2-wire start. That means startup can be externally triggered. Imagine a solar+battery installation that auto-starts the generator when it needs some extra juice. And a built-in battery tender means that electric starting will still be possible after many months of sitting idle.
Back in 2021, when we bought our Predator 9500, it was the first of its kind kind being offered. The 9 kW class of inverters were new, and much in demand for home backup solutions. Given an active storm season in the southern US, Harbor Freight kept selling out!
Since then similar models have been offered by a number of brands. As a practical matter, many of them come from the same Chinese manufacturer. If I had to make the purchase now, I’d probably choose Duromax for their 5 year warranty.
It will be interesting to see where these monster XP28000’s start to show up. Duromax has been taking pre-orders for a time. Deliveries supposedly started in late March.
P.S. – Nothing succeeds like excess! But I do wonder if this monster goes too far?
P.P.S. – I see that Gavin at the Generator Superstore just did an unboxing video.
