Portable ac ?

I imagine it is but it's not going to be any more doable than I don't know what you're doing now You're talking about Arlington Virginia I guess you're living in the car I'm not sure how you can do that in Arlington VA but right or are you saying you just leave the air on in the car so when you come out of your house to get in and it's always cold like a Tesla You don't really want to be doing that because your car is not plugged in so you're using gas to charge the battery to keep the air supported so I'm not sure about your situation but others will chime in here in a few minutes that have dealt with some of these antics..

 

It's only sort of practical. You'd need a very large battery ($$$$) to get enough run-time out of a traditional window or portable AC to matter. And you'd still have to buy energy somewhere to recharge that battery, and spend hours each day charging it enough to last through the following night.

I suggest that you consider taking the car in for air conditioning service. The automatic nature of the Prius air conditioner means that if your system has leaked a little bit of refrigerant, the controller will force the compressor to run faster to make up for the pressure shortfall. This consumes a lot more energy (ultimately gasoline) than is normal, but there's no meter or indicator to tell you if this is happening. You just need gas more often.

When the built-in system is running properly, it is much cheaper to run than any kind of battery-operated secondary system you could put together.

EDIT:

Maybe this is more practical than I'd first thought. I was just reading about a specialty portable AC unit called Zero Breeze. From what I read it could solve this problem reasonably well. Looks like it is about $1,500-2k when purchased with enough batteries to make it work overnight in a Texas summer.

That is about what I'd expect you'd have to spend to cobble something together with a more traditional portable AC and a big Bluetti-type battery box, but the Zero Breeze takes up less space and looks like it is generally easier to set up and deal with.

 

i can't see how it would be worthwhile, prius a/c is pretty efficient, and what a hassle it would be

 

???? The a/c is ELECTRIC, it doesn't use "fuel".
It uses very little electricity to run, it's very efficent.
"IF" the Prius A/C is in proper working condition you won't have any problem
staying cool. Check the cabin air filter, perhaps it needs replacing?
Also, flush out the radiator and condensor, they do tend to get dirty and clog.

 

Well, I've been looking deeper into this-

That Zero Breeze (and its competitors) are an interesting idea. They only do around ~2200BTU of cooling and they only draw about 240W.

That isn't a lot of cooling power in general, but it would be enough to keep a car interior cool overnight. I doubt it would feel like enough during daytime.

Even though it's about half the power of the smallest home window air conditioners, it is still a pretty big electrical load- but not impossible.

I could see this working out if the cooling requirement is for nighttime only, and if there's an opportunity to recharge the batteries cheaply from mains grid (at work etc) to take back to the car fully charged each evening.

That way there's no need to leave the Prius in READY mode all night, and no gasoline used. And they could work exactly like that in all other cars too- the Prius could lose its cachet with campers.

The big downsides I see is that these low-power portables are 4-6x the price of small window units and you'd still need hundreds of dollars worth of battery to get an all-night run. Plus you need to figure out the external venting and a condensation drain for it.

 

Huh ... I guess I've found that, in their FAQ:

They say BTU but they'd better mean BTU/hr or they're just not talking sense.

For comparison, the Prius gen 2 New Car Features manual specs out its A/C as 4500 watts cooling output (which, at 3.412 BTU per watthour, comes to 15,400 BTU/hr) when running at full output. The central A/C cooling my house is only 18,000 BTU/hr (but then, my house is not a rolling box with upward-facing glass and sheet metal walls).

I don't have that section of the gen 3 New Car Features manual to compare, but I expect it's pretty similar.

As for efficiency, when the Prius A/C is running flat-out I've seen it consume around 2300 watts of electrical power, which, to produce 4500 watts of cooling, looks like an EER right around 2. The Zero Breeze is claiming an EER of 9.58.

That looks like a big efficiency advantage for the Zero Breeze, but it might not be fair to compare the car's flat-out performance to the much smaller Zero Breeze. The Prius A/C is variable, so if you are in the car at night when the Zero Breeze's 2300 watts of cooling can keep you comfortable, the Prius A/C would also be doing only 2300 watts of output, and it's EER may be higher (I don't know this for sure) down around 15% capacity like that.

As for the car's A/C being ELECTRIC and not using fuel ... if this car isn't a plugin or Prime, there's not one electric watt-second to be used that didn't come from burning some fuel.

 

Awesome, post links so we can check it out!!