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How I Prepared My 2012 Prius Hybrid For Use As An Emergency Generator To Run My Refrigerator

Discussion in 'Gen 3 Prius Main Forum' started by ca3799, Jul 29, 2024 at 8:36 AM.

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  1. ca3799

    ca3799 Junior Member

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    The first image is the "Why". Feel free to skip that part.

    The Second begins the "How".

    My test run had me powering just my refrigerator for 4 hours. The cost for the materials was $277.00 USD. My goal was to not lose a couple of hundred dollars in refrigerated and frozen food during an extended power outage.

    To operate just the refrigerator, I calculated that I would use approximately 2 gallons of gasoline per day. I had enough Wattage left over to run fans, lights, computers, and to charge phones and spare batteries.

    Adding more load would likely increase the gasoline requirement by a small amount but the car is as powerful as a 1,000 Watt, free-standing, emergency gasoline generator but is very efficient because it uses only 2 gallons of gas a day instead of 12 gallons or more.

    That the car is cleaner (less CO2) and quieter than a gas generator is a bonus as well.

    How I Prepared My 2012 Prius Hybrid For Use As An Emergency Generator To Run My Refrigerator In A Power Outage. (Long)
     
    #1 ca3799, Jul 29, 2024 at 8:36 AM
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2024 at 8:46 AM
  2. Tombukt2

    Tombukt2 Senior Member

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    Very cool I guess that's what these new fangled power stations do for you now The little ones that have a small generator a few outlets can connect to a solar thing and all of this kind of stuff basically brings you the 2 gallons a day possibly less making electricity and so on yeah very cool Not sure if I want to run my car to do that but their guys that have used all kinds of different engines tractors and the like to turn stationary generator heads or even portable ones there's all kinds of ways to skin this cat personally I use a diesel generator diesel will be here forever The military and big industry runs on diesel forever pretty much It's going to be a long time until battlefield equipment is electrified or anything like that but this is very good use of what you have and all of that so I guess with the three or four sitting around here we could power up whatever but it won't run the whole farm but still pretty cool. But now as I understand it you can buy one of these things that does just this that you can carry with one hand put it in the trunk of the Prius or wherever you got to go and it's similar in efficiency. But you have to pay for it
     
    #2 Tombukt2, Jul 29, 2024 at 9:12 AM
  3. Tombukt2

    Tombukt2 Senior Member

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    Lots of folks with families and living in certain places that they do will need things like transfer switches and automatic start so people don't have to have an electronics degree to bring the generator online so things like that make some of this prohibitive for some.
     
    #3 Tombukt2, Jul 29, 2024 at 9:17 AM
  4. ca3799

    ca3799 Junior Member

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    Yes- the generator purchase, transfer switch installation, and auto-start feature were things I did not want to do. Those things are far more expensive and complicated than the system I have described.

    I wanted a small, easy to understand, easy to store, and simple to set up system with a low investment cost and that requires no maintenance or permanent modifications to my home.

    You can certainly buy a gas generator and add transfer switches and auto-starts to your electrical system yourself (if you are properly licensed and know how) or you can pay someone to do those things for you, but this smaller, easy-to-use, storable, and less expensive system is what suits my needs.
     
    #4 ca3799, Jul 29, 2024 at 9:58 AM
  5. Tombukt2

    Tombukt2 Senior Member

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    Yes I added those things and I'm not licensed I just bought them from a reliable manufacturer in that industry have a budded builds and makes generators for a living on a large scale and he is giving me the basic primers on what I needed to do to get a proper system set up on the property here that makes sense that can also work with solar and storage and all of that so it had to be somewhat engineered for my application but this didn't really cost a lot or take a whole lot of doing all the stuff is readily available and relatively not seriously expensive these days options to buy used and etc are wide open of course my house is permanent and not going to be for sale and out of my possession or anything like that that I know of so modifications to the dwelling are definitely forthcoming I built it I tried to pretty much build everything in that I could foresee circuit for electric car charging at 100 amp all of that stuff.
     
    #5 Tombukt2, Jul 29, 2024 at 10:33 AM
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