Safe Idling times in my Prius stuck in hurricane Irma here in South Florida ?

It will greatly depend on how much work/load the a/c is doing. I recall seeing 3/4 gallon per hour in one camping thread but I don't recall the weather conditions. It's usually about twice as fast to use a 12v powerplug-to-USB port than the car's USB port.

Down here, the hardest hit areas from Harvey are still w/o power @ two weeks but progress is rapidly increasing.

GOOD LUCK!

 

Been done many times. On average a Gen2 will consume 2 gallons of gas a day if left in READY mode with a medium load. You can pull 1200W out of the 12v system total. Car uses about 200W-300W usually on the 12v, leaving you with 900W on the input side. Charging phones (2.5W-20W a piece) is a barely noticeable load.

 

I've kept mine running all night in freezing temps with the heat on low just to keep the cabin slightly more instead of freezing. I used at just under a gallon

 

Stay safe!

 

A few years ago, for my Gen 1, I did those calculations for winter (using heat, not A/C), So it's not exactly the same situation, but gives an example of how to work it out. I compared two strategies: one, use the car's heat, but set to the minimum temperature setting. That came out to about three days for a full tank.

The other strategy was to have the car's climate control turned off, but just power a 40 watt heated blanket wrapped around my own personal self. That came out to about nine days for a tank.

There's a known amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and the car's got a certain efficiency in converting that, so it won't surprise you that every question about how long you can stretch n gallons of gas will come back to: how fast are you using the energy?

The A/C compressor is variable speed, over a wide range, to match the cooling load. When it isn't cycled completely off, it can be drawing anywhere between a couple hundred and a few thousand watts. You can see that figure in real time with a scantool plugged into the DLC port. A scantool can also read out the gallons-pre-hour consumption of the engine. You could stage a few trials at different levels of A/C effort and see what you get.

-Chap

 

It's going to be interesting. Be careful down there. We're going to get a pretty good dose of Irma, too, if the predictions hold up.

 

The latest track shows Irma is headed straight for you jerrymildred. Get to high ground before tomorrow evening when Irma is expected to make landfall in the Tampa area (if you haven't headed for the hills already which is what I would have done). That's one mean bi*** coming to your neighborhood.

 

Indeed! Thanks. All our hatches are battened down. We're not in an evac area and I don't want to get caught in traffic. So we're leaving in the morning to stay with friends in a newer house on even higher ground. Tomorrow night is NOT going to be pleasant! But right now, it's so nice that it's hard to imagine what's coming. Life is like that sometimes.

 

A friend who rode out Harvey lost his shutters and debris quickly broke through the double pane windows and chewed through several sections of his roof with the ensuing water damage. He said he won't stay for the next one.

They finally got power yesterday when the electric company brought in two of these giant diesel train engine powered generators to feed the area neighborhoods because it will take weeks to months to get power poles back in since they are somewhat remote and it's a long line.

 

Wow, @fotomoto! Our power company said they expect to have a million customers w/o power from Irma.

And it turns out that we now are in an evacuation zone. We were already planning to go farther inland in the morning anyway.

 

Stay safe everyone

 

Going home in a while to check on things. Not expecting problems other than possible lack of electricity. Latest update on the Duke Energy outage page was before 8 PM last night.

 

Definitely keep safe. Did you evacuate both Prii?

 

We drove my PiP and put the '07 in our garage. No property damage to home or either car, although I think the PiP got pressure washed.

Lots of tree debris on the roads coming home. Stoped to check on one snowbird friend's house but couldn't quite get there due to a flooded intersection. Our back fence is wobbly, so I'll be fixing that tomorrow. A couple shingles look they had had to hang on for dear life, but seem OK. Less than 5 miles away there was a lot more damage ... billboards and signs blown down, huge tree on the road, and so on. Our neighborhood had a few fences blown down and a couple small trees. There's a HUGE dead oak close by that did just fine. LOL!

We have the day off again tomorrow to finish fixing up and get over the lack of sleep last night. I know a lot of people got really beat up and there are still many w/o electricity, and there's a lot of cleaning up to do, but for us it was actually kind of fun. No worse than many of the storms we had on Roatán. Kind of reminds me of a warm blizzard if you're familiar with that meteorological adventure.

 

Sounds reasonable. Do you have power and water at home?

 

Yup! It's almost like nothing happened here. But I don't have to go far to see damaged trees. I think we only lost power long enough to mess up the clocks. Neighbors said their lights just flickered a couple times. But they said it was a loud night here. Our hosts had a very quiet house, but over there, we lost power for an hour yesterday long before the storm.

Edit to add, I got an automated call from Duke Energy that said it may take several days for them to assess the damages and get going in a safe and efficient repair operation. Thankfully, We're OK right now.

 

Glad to hear you are doing even better than OK!