Prius Whole house Converdant Inverter

Just to report for people who maybe interested in 5KW or 3KW inverter to connect to a Gen4 or a Prius Prime to run as a "whole house" back-up generator. Here is the latest info direct from PLUGOUT POWER, LLC (formerly known as ConVerdant Vehicles). Connected to my Prius Prime with a full charge in the traction battery, it was able to run 4.95kW loads continuously for at least 10 min without starting the engine. The unit is too bulky to be moved around, and you will need direct connection to the traction battery which requires some modification on the decking. It is very pricey, and for my use it is still not powerful enough, so I decided not to purchase. But for someone who need 3-5kW of emergency power to run off of super efficient hybrid car, it maybe a consideration.

 

It’s on an Electronic Technical Manual disc from Japan. (See the PriusChat Wiki page.)

For Toyota’s Japanese manuals, the only subscription source I know about is FAINES, which isn’t available to the foreign public. You’re correct, however, that the information about models built for sale in Japan is generally published only in the Japanese language, as are the advertisements:

 

Who makes the DC step down transformer and inverter that converdant sells?

 

If you can get Randy to tell you, could you send me the Coke recipe while you're at it?

He has sold products with various manufacturers. There was a 2 kW version for a while that was made by AIMS, but it was a custom build. I contacted AIMS about it, and they told me they haven't got the schematics for it anymore. I think it was Jack Chen who first talked them into building it, and then ConVerdant was selling a nearly-identical version later for a while.

The old ConVerdant 3kW and 5kW ones have a sort of distinctive logo on the circuit boards, but it's not a logo I recognize. They were clearly designed for uninterruptible power supplies with single-phase output, and then Frankensteined to lose the bypass and backup-battery functions, but to have split-phase output instead.

I have no idea about the provenance of the newest ones.

 

If you think you might recognize it, it's at the top left of the circuit board photo in my old review.