on hunkering, Gen 3 style

Found this post interesting, and just for s&g's thought I'd throw in some Gen 2 numbers, since 1's & 4's were also mentioned.

I had simply hit the defrost button on the steering wheel with it set to 75 deg. Outside it was about 20 deg F.

While just warming the coolant, got about 0.25 GPH. When topping the battery, it kicked up to about 0.45 - 0.50 GPH.
I didn't stopwatch the duty cycle, but offhand it appeared to be around 50/50.

This was while waiting in a long drivethru line last night, lights off & with the radio blaring.

 

A video from Mountain Springs Adventures:
'How "climate control" of a Toyota Prius (and other hybrid cars) works for camping & sleeping!'
^I can't post links yet since this is my first post, but there's the title

It shows his setup for heating. He says he keeps his heat setting at 65 F, and uses a small 250 watt AC heater connected to an inverter. He claims it increases the time between starts, though he doesn't provide specific benchmarks, so it may be possible that one can increase hunkering times further.

It may help in lieu of a "hunker extender", but I might try to build an extender if I get the chance later. It would require a bit of work, and programming a micro-controller.

I need to try a heater to be certain, but some of the supposed pros are that it would increase efficiency and airflow. It could also be used along with heated blankets.

A con with his specific setup is that his heater is connected to an inverter. If there's about a 10% efficiency hit from the conversion, a DC heater may be more efficient, and you wouldn't have to fiddle with turning an inverter on and off whenever you weren't using it, although some inverters have remote switches. If I try it, I think I'll get a DC heater at a comparable wattage that runs on the 12V car plug.

 

That's interesting, because I spent about 24 hours stationary between tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike during and after that storm. We weren't physically stuck in the snow directly, but the heavy holiday traffic came to a standstill because trucks couldn't make the hills, and plows couldn't keep up with the snowfall rate (or couldn't get through).

Some people ran out of fuel idling their engines to keep warm. They had the excuse that, due to the storm, electric power (hence gasoline pumps) was out in the last town before they got on the Turnpike.

Many years later on a bus trip, my mother met a bus driver who told of getting stuck on the Turnpike in a bus by the same incident.

 

The losses in the inverter would simply become heat, so wouldn't be wasted, if heat is all you're trying to get from it. Still, using an inverter would be a pointless complication if a 12-volt heater is available.

 

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