Questions about hooking up inverter in car

I have a 1500 watt modified sine wave inverter that I would like to hook up to the Prius to run a few household items during power outages and I'm hoping someone can help me answer some questions.

1. How do I hook up the inverter to the battery? Normally I hook up the wires directly to a 12 volt battery with nothing else attached to it so I hook up to the terminals. In this case the battery is already connected to the car.

2. Where can I buy a fuse to use for this setup other than Amazon or some online site? I would like to just be able to drive to a store to buy a fuse to get this up an running quickly.

3. What do I risk if I don't use a fuse in my connection?

 

Thanks for the response V8Cobrakid. I guess I first have to figure out if my inverter has a fuse built in. Hopefully it does. It's a Cobra CPI 1575 inverter.

I still can't picture how to connect the wiring to the battery since there are already wires hooked up to it from the car. Maybe I'll have to go home to pick up the Prius before I head to a car parts store so I can show them the battery setup and they can help me with connectors.

 

I hooked up the inverter to the battery today without any problems. I wasn't able to find the recommended fuse in any local auto parts store so I didn't use an external fuse. I wasn't sure where to connect the ground wire to the vehicle. Any ideas?

I ran an extension cord to my refrigerator and ran it as a test. After a while I noticed the watts drawn shown on the inverter was lower than what I'm used to seeing and once I checked into it I found the voltage coming out of the inverter was 78-79 volts(using a volt meter). Last time I used the inverter it worked fine so now I don't know if it was a coincidence that it isn't working or if something happened today that caused this. Either way my test did not go well.

As a side note I've run this refrigerator many times with the inverter and never had any problems. From what I remember the startup watts are in the 1,000 to 1,100 watt range for a short period of time and then it draws 170-190 watts when running.

One more question. The local auto parts store carries 250 amp amg fuses instead of the recommended 250 amp anl fuses. Does anyone know if the amg would work in a pinch. In other words would it be better than not using a fuse?

The manual states: We recommend a main fuse in the battery's positive cable to protect against DC wiring short circuits(external to the inverter) ... We recommend a Buss fuse ANL-250 or equivalent. The specific fuse amperage should be sized to allow operation of all your DC powered equipment.