Being a relatively new Prius owner I've been doing my usual obsessive web research about them. I'm seeing talk of people running inverters off the 12v battery and running chest type freezers by leaving the car "on" so the engine can occasionally start to recharge the batteries all night from the garage. Seems to be in colder areas of the States where power outages are not so rare due to snow and protracted sub zero temps. Anyone else heard of or done this? Personally, if this were me I would have already adapted by purchasing a nice, quiet Honda inverter/generator made for that purpose rather than to subject a 25,000.00 (+) vehicle for something it wasn't designed to do. But, hey. When I grew up in Florida, every house had air conditioning. No one parked their cars in the living room, opened all the doors and blasted its A/C all night. Any and all thoughts welcome. Technical and otherwise personal experiences. Maybe this is a legitamate "off label" use.
Pretty beefy 12v inverters are under $100, smaller than a shoebox, and require no maintenance. A generator might be a better option, especially for higher loads, but I don't think that makes a Prius+inverter a bad option. It shouldn't hurt the Prius and it'll probably use less gas than a generator.
There are quite a few threads here on running a house's critical systems from a Prius in a power outage. No-one has reported any problems that I know of. I ran my Prius c for 54 hours straight during the multi-day power outages when Sandy hit Long Island in 2012.
I'm guessing that your Prius C ran intermittently during that period to keep the battery charged etc - wondering how much fuel you burned during that time so as to how efficient a process it was.
Most of the stuff I read said about 5-10 minutes of the ICE running per hour. If you figure 70mpg at just turning an "alternator" to charge the 12v, then it would take 8 hours (splitting the time to 7.5 minutes of run time per hour) to burn 1 gal. 8hrs x 11.9gals would be 95.2 hours or almost 4 days on a tank. All of this is assuming a WAG (wiled a$$ guess on the time the ICE actually ran) from those who posted on other forums since they seemed to just be estimates. I also made a boatload of assumptions and didn't factor in that there was no load on the ICE propelling a Prius down the highway. You could probably make 6 days but I would personally use my calculations as a worst case scenario and be refilling before 3 days were up. Please check the math someone. My last math class was calculus but that was 20 years ago. Ftl. What kind of time did you get before refilling during those 54 hours?
I have an obd2 scanner on the way - will b e interested to see what the gallons/hour measurement is for my Prius C idling in my driveway ---
Here's my original post from 2012 in the middle of the outage. As you'll see from that, I was running a fairly light load, so the gas consumption was quite low and I didn't have to refuel. If I recall correctly, the engine came on for about thirty seconds every ten or fifteen minutes, probably not much more than it would with the car in Ready and no other load connected. I do now have a 1000 watt inverter ready to use, with a quick connect to the 12V battery, but haven't needed to use it in the 18 months since Sandy. Here's another thread on the subject, which also has links to two more.
Yes, it works fine. search for "PRIUPS" From the cars point of view all it's doing is sitting quietly and turning on the ICE from time to time to top off the 12 volt battery. It's the lightest possible duty. Most people hook up an inverter to the 12 volt, but a few wild eyed radicals have gone for a direct connection to the traction battery. I installed a plug in connector to the trunk so I could plug mine in and out at will. (I didn't need to carry it around town)
