Prius Car Living Electrical Setup

Isn’t Alaska really cold? That’s a lot of electrical demand you are wanting. Maybe you should wait until spring to do this temporary live in car plan?

I guess if you leave the car running with the climate control at a reasonable temperature, it can be possible. Even then the power demands you are wanting would still need a household outlet. Maybe you’ll need to get rid of the air fryer, electric blanket, refrigerator, curling iron, hair dryers, cook top etc

 

a tiny system in one the remotest areas know to man in temp extremes .Dayum fluffy'd say.

 

Starting below -25c(-13F) your engine will be cycling on/off every 30 sec to maintain heat, eventually the engine will be on longer than it is off. Covering the grill will reduce that only a couple of seconds per cycle but not much. A thick window insulation inside and a car cover with (strategic fresh air ventilation) might help the engine and cabin keep warm. But you have to make sure your car is pointed towards the wind so the exhaust blows away from the back of the car.

If you can, renting a room will be much cheaper safer practical...even the smallest room is better than your car. This from someone who occasionally car camp a couple of days when travelling alone. Talk to friends you trust if they are willing to rent one of their rooms to you. We had a friend who considered living in her car but rented a room with us for 14 years. To this day her mailing address is still our house, and she still house sits and feed our cat whenever we are on vacation.

 

Those should be pretty easy. If they all have USB-C PD in these days, you could just get a nice 12-volt multi-output PD brick to wire in; monoprice.com is a place I would check.

also easy, using the refrigerant-cycle (not thermoelectric) ones that can end up drawing less than 12 watts on average, once they are maintaining temperature. (More like 72 watts when first plugged in, until the temperature is on target.) Here's the thread:

What car fridge 12v would you recommend? | PriusChat

Something to think about, though: I haven't seen one of those that is capable of raising temperature to maintain a target temperature in the fridge-storage range. Should be fine all the while you are in the car and living there, as you'll have the car temperature comfortable for you. But the fridge may have no way to avoid becoming a freezer when you are away from your car. Might be an interesting mod if you are the tinkering sort.

Let the car do that part. It can give you 5300 watts of heat while doing other things with the engine, like recharging from your electric usage. Trying to rig anything else to give you a credible amount of heating would swell your power budget to impractical dimensions.

Also don't overlook the seat heaters, if your car has them.

Here's a relevant thread: on hunkering, Gen 3 style | PriusChat

A nice addition. I found a nice 12-volt one around 40 or 48 watts. Easy on the power budget, and lets you set the car's thermostat on its lowest setting (65℉ in US cars; the next lower setting is "LO", which prevents it ever using heat).

I had to shop around a bit to find one that doesn't turn itself off after a certain time. I think that's a feature the safety regulators call for, to make sure you don't fall asleep and wake up with burns. I found it annoying on long drives, though, where I'd be comfortable, and then wondering why I wasn't comfortable anymore, and then remembering to reach and push the button again, over and over. As soon as that one stopped working I shopped around for one without that 'feature'. (Not sure how I was able to find one, if the feature is something safety regulators call for, but somehow I did.)

You can also find 12-volt heated gloves (around 22 watts or so, total IIRC, not per-hand). Motorcycling-gear businesses sell them. Likewise footies.

My gloves have a metal grommet in each glove where the power cord goes in through the lining. The gloves mostly feel just comfortably warm (the designers seem to have chosen 22 watts just about right), but I can end up with nice grommet-shaped burns on the backs of my wrists. I keep thinking "I should sew little pieces of fabric over those grommets" and I keep not doing it.

That's a thing about most electric blankets and other electric clothing: they're not really temperature-regulated. So many watts go in and they get as hot as they get. The blanket has a heat wire looped back and forth through it. There's a fuse somewhere, and a few thermal protective switches here and there along the loop (you can feel the extra lumps). But with use there can come to be hot spots where the wire has bunched up, that might burn you while you sleep, maybe even in a worst case melt or ignite something.

A newer approach (I have one at home) involves a blanket or mattress pad with tubes of water running through it. Electric heat and a small pump are in a little self-contained unit the tubes connect to, and it regulates the water temperature to a target you select, so the blanket or pad can't ever get hotter than that. It's closer to a 400-watt load, by nameplate, when heating, but, like the fridge, once it reaches target temperature it averages just a fraction of that to maintain it.

To use one in a cold climate, and have it not freeze when you're away from the car, would require using something like RV antifreeze instead of water, and the manual for mine sternly warns against using anything besides straight water, so someone might want to research what actual risks might be posed by an antifreeze solution passing through the heater and pump. It's an idea I kind of like, but haven't pinned down what the risks might be.

aquabedwarmer.com is one supplier. Recent versions of such systems are able to cool the water as well as heat it, for use in summer as well.

The only such systems I've seen are 120 VAC input, so you'd end up plugging them into an inverter; I don't know of any made for direct 12 VDC supply.

Should all be easy. LEDs are so efficient you should be able to light it up like a stadium with minimal effect on the budget.

Induction plate, air fryer, hair dryer, those are the biggies. Each of those by itself is pretty much at the limit of what you can get from the car's DC/DC converter, using a 12-volt-input inverter. But of course you'll only use them for short bursts.

I've found an Instant Pot to be a super-versatile thing to have around, and I was able to buy one of their 3-quart models that uses only 700 watts, rather than the 1100 of their larger models. 700 is easy to fit in a power budget.

This might be the nicest way to handle your large, intermittent loads like the induction plate, air fryer, or hair dryer. You could be steadily charging it from the car all the time, and it could supply your high-power loads for as long as you use them.

This is probably worth doing for the convenience, even if it doesn't end up being the whole answer. Mine is 1000 watts, a commonly-available and inexpensive size, and around the most you can count on continuously from the car's DC/DC converter (assuming most of the car's own heavier electrical loads are off at the time). It's not unheard of to up that to a 1500 or even 2000-watt nameplate, if you can get one of those as cheaply, and might allow your brief uses of the hair dryer or air fryer without the inverter complaining and turning off. You have to understand you won't be getting that much continuously from the car though.

That's not a lot different from rolling your own power bank, and it might have been more popular back before 'power bank' became such a commonly-available product type in its own right. These days, I would wonder if you can roll your own and beat the price, convenience, and outside-the-car portability of an off-the-shelf power bank.

The thread for that is here: Electric power from a hybrid, connecting inverter to the high-voltage system | PriusChat

You can get around 3000 watts continuous from your Prius that way, but as you've guessed, the products are harder to find and have been expensive, and it's a more-specialized installation that fewer people will be able to help with (even if you manage to find one of those inverters on resale for cheap, which sometimes happens). I didn't see anything in your power budget that made me think you would need to pursue that.


One last question: are you physically very limber and flexible? You'll need to be, to move around inside a Prius from sleeping to cooking to driving to hairstyling and all, especially once it is packed with all of the things you're likely going to have in there with you.