We were just slammed with nasty old hurricane Milton. I drove about a half hour away to Tampa to hide, we used my Prius and its inverter to power the fridge, a lamp, and a coffee maker, while charging cell phones and a spotlight intermittently for two days when the power went out. Then I drove back to Pinellas county and hooked it up here and did the same thing for two more days. Total gas consumption, about 2/5 of a tank. Other people using noisy, smelly gas generators kept running out of gas. I also did not waste any fuel driving around looking for fuel, when there wasn't any to be had, like a lot of people did. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
I used a 400 watt inverter running of the 12v battery to charge things and to run a fan. It wasn't enough to run the fridge or anything else. It ran off the New sodium hybrid battery I recently got. But I need to larger inverter! I'm still in Sarasota.
No, I connect with clamps to the possitve fitting in the fuse box then grounded it on a bolt. I've have that inverter for about 30 years....
Newbie question: how do you connect this to your house, or do you just run a heavy duty extension cord in? is powering the fridge and stove practical?
Electric stove powered by a Prius, probably not practical. (A single cooker, Instant Pot, or induction hot plate, easy). Gas stove that only uses electricity for the controls and oven light, easy. Recently in another thread there was a link to somebody marketing a standard-sized induction cooktop containing its own Li battery, charged by plugging into a standard household outlet, and able to give some hours of full-power cooking time. Several thousand dollars, though.
As always, a reminder to connect your appliances directly to your inverter. If you attempt to feed power into your home load center, please use a real inlet and interlock switch.
two extension cords, two power strips. load 1200w is typical w few peaks around 2500 for short durations. just running tv microwave, lights. at night I ran one small ac, 900w.
Isn't that too much load for the Prius inverter? The best inverter would be a pure sine wave toroidal inverter, which has less quiescent current than the others. To charge cell phones without killing its battery, the inverter must have a pure sine wave, like in a home outlet. I guess everyone knows that. I would connect a capacitor of several farads in parallel to the 12V battery so that it absorbs current surges, which are fatal to the battery, and I think to the Prius inverter too.
Different posts in this thread have been about adding an inverter powered by the 12-volt system or adding an inverter powered by the 202-volt system. Of course inverters with a 12-volt input are more widely available and easy to find. For those, your sustainable consumption is going to be limited by the capacity of the DC/DC converter in the Prius, because that's what supplies the 12-volt system when the car is READY, and keeps the 12-volt battery from being depleted. That DC/DC converter capacity is around 1 to 1.5 kW, depending on how many of the car's own electrical loads are in use. But the inverter you install doesn't have to be limited to that capacity; you can use a larger one and draw larger amounts of power at times—just depleting the 12-volt battery to make up the difference—as long as you aren't expecting to do it for long periods. If you find a higher-input-voltage inverter and attach it to the car's traction battery, you're no longer limited by the car's own DC/DC converter. You end up able to use about 3 kW. The limiting factor there is simply the firmware controlling the engine: the hybrid system has much greater capacity than 3 kW, but to generate more, the engine has to rev above idle speed, and it doesn't when the car is just parked and keeping the battery charged. Hard to know where to start with any of the rest of that. The inverters being discussed here are generally going to be pure sine; they've come down in price enough there's not nearly the market for other weird waveforms that there used to be. I've used both an inverter with a toroidal output transformer and a transformerless one, and both do the job just fine. The transformerless one is much smaller and lighter; the 3 kVA toroid by itself is 16 kg in the other one, never mind the larger, heavier case needed to house it. I think they used it in that one just as a simple way to get 120/240 VAC split-phase output. The lighter, transformerless one just produces 120 VAC in a single phase. Between the inverter and any cell phone battery is going to be the cell phone charger, which is the thing I'd mostly worry about exposing to a non-sinusoidal waveform, but people have reported using them without problems. Those SMPS chargers are notorious for not drawing anything like a sinusoidal current anyway. This business about current surges being fatal to the battery or to the Prius inverter, where's that coming from? A Prius sees bigger current surges from acceleration and braking than an accessory inverter is going to cause, and with nothing anywhere like "several farads" of capacitance in the system. The batteries and electronics do fine. As a practical matter, "several farads" in parallel with the 12-volt battery would work out to several hundred joules of stored energy, which I'm pretty sure would meet a NFPA 70E threshold for worker thermal-hazard protection when working around it.
Doesn't the Prius use a hybrid battery for braking and accelerating? As I understand it, the 12V battery is used to make the Prius ready and also when the hybrid battery is disconnected by two relays, and the circuit in the inverter that controls the 12V battery is not capable of carrying heavy loads, like the circuit for a hybrid battery.
Right, the hybrid powertrain operates at the higher, traction battery voltage, and all of the other electrical equipment in the car operates at 12 volts, just as in other conventional cars. All of that other electrical equipment is powered by the 12-volt battery, when the car's power mode is OFF, ACC, or IG-ON. (In OFF mode, the battery is powering mostly just ECU memories, the clock, the smart-key system, and whatever lights might be on. In ACC mode, it's also powering the infotainment system and the power outlets. In IG-ON mode, it's powering all the car's 12-volt loads.) In READY mode, that whole 12-volt system is getting its power from the car's DC/DC converter, which converts the higher HV bus voltage down to 13–15 volts, which is also a voltage high enough to replenish the 12-volt battery. So if you add a typical 12-volt input inverter on the 12-volt system, you should pay attention to the power capacity of the car's DC/DC converter. As mentioned above, you can budget for 1 to not quite 1.5 kW depending on how many of the car's own electrical loads are in use. Normally, when you're parked and using it as a power source, you won't have much power going to the car's own loads. If you try on purpose to load everything down, say high beams, fan on high, defrosters and seat heaters, rolling the windows up and down, and cranking the power steering back and forth, you should expect very little capacity left over for your inverter loads. As also mentioned above, you can put a larger inverter there if you want, as long as your larger power draws will just be occasional things. On those occasions, you'll be getting what power the car's DC/DC converter can give you, and the balance will be coming out of the 12-volt battery.
I thought there was some kind of fuse limiting the Prius inverter. It's got a max output of some 1,500 watts. But if you hook up to the 12v, that 12v becomes a buffer/burst wattage. I've been looking into generators again... Every winter, since the Texas freeze, I look at them. I'm leaning towards a duel fuel and 3,500+ running watts. Couple propane tanks hidden in the back yard, generator in the garage and be set for the no power. Regular 5 gallon in the garage for the lawn stuff. I basically want to be able to power 1 1,500 watt space heater at minimum. If I had to run it from my car, that would probably be a 100ft extension cord.
It's all in that other thread, but we're sticking with a generator. Mostly because my wife is pretty good at being out of town with the Prius while I'm at home with the baby during a blackout.
Most of those leads (including some outdated / out of business ones) should be in this thread: Electric power from a hybrid, connecting inverter to the high-voltage system | PriusChat
Yep. You can use the traction battery and an inverter for a bigger 'spit-can' if you do it right. I use propane and a genny - soon to be backed up by solar and a LiFePO4 bank. The advantage with propane is that you can store energy safely and more efficiently, long term and you never have to worry about whether or not the generator will start when you REALLY need it. (**) Late edit - if you live in hurricane country!!! Ice storms may present a different challenge for propane, solar, as well as ICE vehicles..... Priuses are a great flex, but they get into accidents, get sold, bust head gaskets, etc.... NOBODY who lives in 'Hurricane Country' thinks that generators are 'noisy and smelly' after a few weeks without power! People who haven't eaten or slept well or showered for two weeks get smelly and noisy!!!
Careful handing out advice like that. While it is likely to be true in your neighborhood, up north it can get cold enough to prevent smaller tanks from offering enough vapor pressure to operate equipment. Link with further info.
