Easy & Safe Home Power Inverter System for Prius… Good Idea?

dupe.

 

It must have been difficult to go through the hurricane and good to know you survived through it. To answer, no because torq & techstream exist for free, depends on your 'network'. And a generator with supplies of gas oil would be much better in my opinion.

 

You are using your starter battery to power the inverter? Wouldn't it be better to pull power from the battery pack? The battery pack is designed for charge / discharge applications where the starting battery is just a starting battery and even if you use the optima it isn't designed for lots of charge / discharge cycles.

 

After several trips to the car in the pouring rain to check my dashboard, I realized there needed to be a better way. So I started to design an app that would feed me all the vital information.

Wirelessly? Will it need a dongle? Can you make it work for any Toyota?


I went a step further and designed a no-hassle, easy to install, 1000 watt pure sine wave kit for Prius owners.

This market has lots of existing equipment. Can yours be somehow superior?


The traction battery can give you more power, but taping into it is actively dangerous, probably beyond the average owner.

 

Get an OBDII plug with bluetooth (which supposedly gets 30 meters of range) and install an app on your smartphone that reads its data.

 

That is exactly what I did after hurricane Irma - PriUPS in action | PriusChat
OBD2 adapter & Torque on the phone.

Bluetooth worked very well from inside the house to the Prius in the driveway - almost too well - I had to turn off BT in the phone to be able to talk on the phone! When I received a call the audio was out in the Prius while I was wondering why the phone was broke :-/

 

none of that is necessary. monitoring your cars data while using it as a generator is like monitoring it while driving.
great for geeks, but the car will perform as long as it has gasoline, without issue.

 

Unless the Prius is sitting in full sunlight with an operating UPS producing a fair amount of heat & one forgets to leave the AC running in the Prius to keep the UPS & the traction battery somewhat cool.
Even at night, the inside of the Prius gets very warm with an operating UPS because there is no air circulation.
For lower power overnight operation I was able to run the fan on medium speed & outside air which would keep the inside temps somewhat reasonable.

I noticed this problem in two ways: 1) when first set up I would log the temps inside & outside as well as actually sit in the Prius every 15-20 minutes. I quickly noticed the interior temp rising. 2) this was soon verified watching the traction battery temps slowly creep up.

Outside temps were only getting down to 79- 80°F!

 

agreed, forgetting to set the a/c would be a faux pas.

 

I have a small 900 watt 2 stroke generator that I bought for $90. I didn't need to use it for Irma, as I have a bigger generator. That said, I have used it to run a 5000 btu A/C and a 700 watt microwave ( not at the same time) in my camper. I got 8 hrs running the A/C at night from a 1.2 gal tank. It makes sine wave power, too.
If the inverter is placed inside the car, it could be a fire hazard- a 12 volt battery can quickly melt shorted wires/circuits and start a fire in about one minute. A 1000 watt inverter rated for constant usage, would be RV grade and is not cheap.
An inverter thread from a few days ago, mentioned that their Prius ICE didn't kick in to recharge the 12v battery until it got down to 11.5 volts, which is , like 90+% discharged- if this is done repeatedly the life of a lead acid battery will be severely reduced.
Product liability insurance would be a good idea, in case a Prius does catch on fire while an inverter system (made for a Prius) is in use.