I opened the back of my Prius and found only one 12v battery. I ran 8 guage jumper cables from that battery to my inverter and voila, I have power. I felt the cables get warm (not hot), so just to be safe I picked up a set of 6 guage cables. I will put better ends on one pair-side of the cables so they can screw onto the inverter. I would appreciate any advice people give, do you use a 6 or 8 guage wire on yours? What guage should I connect to the deep cycle battery with (can I use my 8 guage set or should I pick up another 6 guage set?)
Back in April 2007 I wrote that my own installation consists of a 1,500/3,000 watt surge inverter, a 12-volt deep cycle battery, and #4 wire cables. I'm confident that #4 wire is more than adequate to handle the 83 amps that will traverse it when operating a 1,000 watt load, but perhaps one of the electrical engineers can chime in on the capacity of #6 wire.
I started up my new 'silent' 6.5kw diesel generator today The thing is soo00o00000000 loud it's shocking. My neighbors are going to want to kill me *
So George, After all this about using your 12v Prius batt to run a 1500 watt inverter why the deisel genset?
I wanted to have two backup sources of power. It's 1250 watts but the Prius can only deliver 1000 watts steadily regardless. The Prius is a backup to my backup....