HARNESSING PRIUS ALTERNATING CURRENTS

you can put a 1,000 watt inverter on the 12v battery, and leave the car in ready mode.

 

Some folks have found a battery back up near 201 Volts DC and then powered the house from the big battery. A/C only happens when the engine is running, so is less efficient than using the battery as the power source.

Most of your house is going to expect 60 Hz A/C, and the engine is variable speed and unlikely to ever be 60 Hz.

 

If you also have Prius inverters in your shop, it has a 200 to 12 volt DC to DC converter built in.

Check out 15 to 18 minutes in.

 

i haven't seen this done here, but there was a company that sold inverters to tap the hybrid battery. they went out of business, as far as i know.

 

Not much in most folks homes or garages that can use 3-phase power!

 

Ac on the Prius is variable frequency. House AC is constant frequency. 60 Hz in US, 50 Hz in Europe and I think those two frequencies are pretty much dominant household frequencies around the world. Also, household power is single phase. In US the single phase is split into two phases 180 degrees apart. That may be done in other parts of the world, I don't know. Three phase AC is used in industrial settings to power big motors. Again, the supplied power is constant frequency, but three phase motor speed is usually controlled by varying the frequency of after the power is delivered (frequency speed controllers).

So taking Prius AC from MG is not practical to power a house. It need to be converted to a single phase constant frequency AC first. And then the engine needs to run all the time to get it. How is that different from a simple (and much cheaper) gas generator?

 

This^^^^^

I looked into it myself and the best you can really do with the Prius is to tap into the hybrid battery and use it to power a large commercial backup UPS system which then buffers the power supplied to the house. This way you know the power is clean, at the right phase and frequency. I know someone used a 6KVA UPS system and it seemed to match well with the Prius' output. Never had any luck matching the highlander up to a UPS as most of that size were used for 3-phase commercial power, not single phase like we have at home.

 

Yeah its finding a 200 volt input Inverter is the problem. When I installed my prolong harness I installed a #6 harness for a fuiture Inverter.
Impossible to find a Inverter at that voltage.

 

Exactly, this is why those commercial UPS setups work well for the purpose (see specs, input voltage 160-275V on P10-11).

http://www.apc.com/salestools/JPRO-9K2KAV/JPRO-9K2KAV_R1_EN.pdf

Batteries are 192V (consisting of sixteen 12V batteries) so charging rate should be around 13.8V ideally for lead acid (13.8V x 192V/12V = 220V......perfect for Prius setups)

 

Thats a 230v AC UPS for Datacenters. We need an Inverter that accepts 200 V DC from the hybrid battery to 110AC house current. Expensive.

Alot of serious datacenters use 48 volt dc for there servers. No switch mode power supply in the unit saves alot power loss and no heat and never fails and never gets ripple.
I know Brighthouse uses that for there Cisco Encoder farms.A typical BH headend will have hundreds of Cisco Encoders. They have dc volt tap system on every rack.
Buddy of mine was an Engineer at one of those BH headends. They keep it 65 F and the China smell from hundreds of plastic Cisco cases is nauseating. Everyone who works there has a cough they cant get rid of.
That China stench smells like Harbor Freight exploded in the room. He quit it made him so sick.

 

When I think smart datacenters I think of this bad boy:

Switch - World-Renowned Data Centers and Technology Solution Ecosystems

Armed guards. Can stay off the grid for months at full power.

 

Ed, look at my post again.......you can see the larger 230V AC output UPS (perfect for a home and also works with portable generators to start the system) actually use a 192V DC battery pack which works perfectly with the (28 module) Prius traction battery for backup power to tap into and work as a generator. The issue for me was the traction battery voltage in the Highlander is too high and the next step up uses a 384V pack (and often puts out 3-phase) so I'm SOL for now using vehicle as a backup generator (since charge voltage needs to be around 430V DC) unless I come up with something seriously custom. I was hoping someone would eventually build a portable 10Kw inverter generator but still waiting on that one too.

If you want to read all about the Prius generator, you can see it here but it's definitely been done already.
Using a Prius as a generator — northernarizona-windandsun
Prius Generator (photos)

 

Because the HV pack modules are wired in SERIES, the absolute power limit is the nominal 212v * 3a that can be sustained for any length of time and even then, not long. The modules typically test between 4500 and 6k mAhr (4.5-6 Ahr), so if you pull 3a from them, you *might* get two hours of run time.

Now, 212V * 3A = 636 Watts, not even enough to run a fridge or coffee-maker, but might keep some LED lights on for a while.

In the end, unless you are using it with the engine running, you will damage the pack and only get an hour or two of benefit. If you are running the engine, you would be FAR better off to find yourself a Honda 2000i that provides 2kwatts continuous at < 0.3 GPH, which is about 1/5th of what the Prius would burn for lower cost than just the inverter.

 

Dxta, you can research a company called Vicor, they manufacture power conversion modules, and specializes in DC-to-DC converters and have a unit that can convert 300VDC to 12VDC with good efficiency and 150W output at 12VDC. These modules can be paralleled to increase the power capability, that way you can tap into the hybrid battery directly....but like 05PreeUs says, you need a way to get the engine running ....if you want to explore further, you can look at the work done by Richard Factor at PriUps.com...i see that you are in Lagos area, you can also pm me and we can talk about it.