constantly plugged-in plug-in?

Its possible but you don't want to be burning gas to create electricity that gets converted a few times and gets put into a battery. There are too may conversion losses to make it worth doing.

Its possible that you still may gain a little more MPG if the engine is producing extra energy that it would normally throw away but no one has done it yet to get some hard data.

 

You get nothing for nothing. I think you are trying to create a perpetual motion machine and it won't work, the laws of physics are not on your side.

 

What you are describing is really a series hybrid, where the gas engine spins a generator and the generator powers an electric motor. That's the way it is done on diesel-electric locomotives and the Chevy Volt hybrid.

With the Prius, this doesn't make any sense since there is already a dual power path from the engine to the drive wheels, and the battery is already being charged by the generator. Adding an external inverter-charger would be redundant.

Tom

 

Unless the PHEV Prius does not regen to the EV battery packs.. then you could flick a switch when you have excess "normal" battery state of charge and transfer power from the main battery to the EV batteries - eg. down a long hill.

 

This is exactly my plan, since we live up 5-mile, at 2,000ft. The Prius OEM pack is all green after about 2 miles, I am hoping to use a simple 12v-115vac converter to drive the Enginer's 115vac-48vdc charger to recoup a little bit of that already paid energy potential...

I did checked with Jack @ Enginer and he said it's perfect ok. I was worried that the Enginer charger may not like the modified sine-wave.
Pb

 

Hi Pb,
I don't think so.

The charger draws 15a at 120vac. So the inverter would need to be a 2kw inverter and so it would draw 180 amps at 12v. You need big cables to carry this current and you probubly would burn up the Prius dc-dc converter.

Thanks,
Dan

 

you probably can't pull over 100 amps (at 12v)... i know for sure in the Gen II you can't.. you probably still can't in the Gen III... your whole car will black out. this causes complete power failure (just about... or so it seems.. screen reboot.. audio shuts off.. etc)

since it's a sensitive charger, you'll probably destroy it (the phev charger) the first time your car blacks out while driving.

(i've had this happen to electronics in my prius)

 

If you live at the top of a long hill at a high elevation, maybe the best strategy would be to deplete the battery as much as possible on the way home using the EV mode. That way you could use the long downhill drive to charge the battery as Toyota intended.

Richard

 

True, but this would only happen with an after-market system grafted onto a normal Prius. No OEM design would ever fully isolate the PHEV battery pack from the ICE. I missed the fact that this post was in the do-it-yourself forum.

Tom