Solar charger plug in

I expect that all your outlets are disconnected from the battery when you turn off the car. Anyone know for sure on a 2014 V model? If you are gung ho about it you could change one to always on.

 

There's no solar roof option on the v. A 12v trickle charge would have no impact on the traction battery SOC. If the vehicle is being parked for weeks, a trickle charger might be worthwhile. But day to day there's no call for charging the 12v batt, it does almost nothing.

 

I can say for certain hat the lighter socket is only 'on' when the car is on in a 2012 v. You could wire it to the 12 volt battery in the hatch. (for all practical purposes, this will not change the HV battery one way or the other)

 

All the solar roof does is move air through the car, it never charges anything.

 

The best and most economical way is to put grid tied solar panels on your house and then get a Prius Plug-in or Chevy Volt and charge it at night with the power you put in the grid during the day.

 

While it is possible to design a circuit to charge any of the car's batteries, the fact is that small solar panels are never going to be enough to make any real difference to the hybrid battery pack.. Especially the cigarette lighter type panels.. I don't know what the quiescent draw of the Prius v is, but on the regular Prius, if you search the forums, you'll find that we had figured out that you need a minimum of about a 5 Watt panel just to offset the drains to the 12V battery while the vehicle was "off".

Again, this is just "breaking even" after a day of basically just leaving the car in a parking lot, we're not even at the point of adding any charge, and this is on the tiny little 12V battery, so just imagine what's needed to add anything significant to the hybrid battery or the plug-in battery... The fact is that there are just too many inefficiencies in the whole process, starting with the solar panels themselves: many people don't realize just how much surface area you need in order for a solar panel to generate useful output.. Think about the roof on your house- a panel that size is needed to generate 10 kilowatts peak output; when you brake on your car, the motor generators can easily exceed that much power output, if only for the few seconds that you brake.. If you completely cover your roof with the cheap cigarette-lighter type panels, you might get 50 Watts at the outside, which you could use to top up the 12V battery, or run a vent fan like the lift-back with solar option (the A/C still runs off the hybrid pack which is *NOT* charged by the solar); maybe if you used the highest efficiency crystalline panels vs cheaper panels, you might get around 200W peak output, and maybe a couple of kilowatt-hours over the course of a day.. So assuming you get get some usable output, then you need a fairly smart charger to manage the hybrid battery, so that's going to take some of the power away, and then you need to do boost conversion to bring the voltage from the solar cells up to hybrid battery voltage, so where you might get a few amps at 12V, you're going to get milliamps by the time you boost, so it really is a trickle charge, one that will be completely eaten up, literally in the very first second of acceleration when you start driving..

If you decide to put a solar panel in your car, your best bet is to get a 10-15W crystalline panel, a charge controller and wire it up directly to the 12V battery.. It won't do anything measurable for your mileage, but there is still somewhat of a benefit in that the system will not have to top up the 12V battery every time you start your vehicle, and you can have some peace of mind in leaving your vehicle parked for extended periods (as long as there is sunlight) without the 12V battery ever going dead on you..

 

have you considered a car cover, covered in solar cells?