With an MEP-002A, I can do a pretty good job of loading the set down by putting four pots of water on to boil on the cooktop. Big eyes are 1100 watts, small are 700 on mine, so that adds up to 3.6 KW of pure resistive load. Further, ours is the old-school GE cooktop which is series or parallel on one or two legs instead of time cycling the element to get different heats - makes it really easy to dial the load up or down. The last time I did an extended max load run test was after a short outage, so I wanted to work the set for another half hour at rated load to get it good and warm before shutdown. One load I generally shed is the 80 gallon water heater. After a couple of hours of sitting, it's always able to apply another 2kw or so of load until it gets the water up to temperature.
The combination allows me to overload the generator, should I want to. I usually set it to 90-100% of rated load and leave it for 30 min or so. Then go to less than 30% of rated load for 5 minutes before shutdown.
Our house had baseboard heaters everywhere. I intend to save a couple of those for a load bank. They'll go inside the small equipment shed, which is beside where the generator pad will be.
