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130 Comments
- sjbdallas, on 12/28/2008, -2/+89Now that gas is cheap again, I never turn my car off.
- fnord185, on 12/28/2008, -1/+72Was the Prius powering this site by any chance?
- navk2005, on 12/28/2008, -15/+83but will it run Crysis?
- oboshoe, on 12/28/2008, -5/+57Yes, but most cars won't automatically fire up the engine to recharge the batterys automatically, plus the prius has a much deeper reserve of DC power.
- greenlight2001, on 12/28/2008, -1/+37I leave a brick on my gas pedal and put it in neutral.
- AgentVladimir, on 12/28/2008, -4/+28What kind of idiot plugs in his freezer in the middle of ice storm? Surely just leave the stuff outside?
- pipebender, on 12/28/2008, -6/+29So, basically, some guy bought a AC inverter from Radioshack and plugs it into the car's cig lighter. Big deal. The car doesn't even needs to be a Prius for this to work.
- willrs, on 12/28/2008, -3/+23wow, that was a painful read.
- Godlike, on 12/28/2008, -5/+24I've messed with stuff like this before, a normal cars electrical system is so haywire and wonky with the voltage levels, I bet you actually can't do this with a normal car or would have huge problems. I think the batteries in the Prius sanitize the power enough to allow for this kind of application.
- YouAreDead, on 12/28/2008, -2/+21At 4 gallons per hour
- Biks, on 12/28/2008, -2/+18But the Prius wasn't running constantly. The engine only kicked in every half an hour to recharge it's batteries. The guy was mostly powering his house off of the Prius batteries.
- meghalc, on 12/28/2008, -0/+15Thats one expensive a$$ emergency generator!
- Halsfield, on 12/28/2008, -0/+13when you have no power and no heat you'll want to do this more than drive someplace, you could also go somewhere, buy gas, and do this.
- ExRe, on 12/28/2008, -1/+13To run all of those things you are probably looking in the neighborhood of 1kw depending on the size of the fridge and freezer. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me.
- Residents, on 12/28/2008, -0/+11Oxymoron - A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist.
Hybrid, runs on both, no incongruity or contradiction in there. Oxymoron isn't the word you wanted there, maybe ironic? - greenlight2001, on 12/28/2008, -2/+13Because ice storms tend to happen when the temperature is in the mid30s to low 40s. Things don't stay frozen in a freezer at those temps.
- hlehmann, on 12/28/2008, -3/+14I think the Prius is just swell, but there's nothing special at all in the fact that this guy used his Prius to run some lights & a fridge. He plugged an inverter into his cigarette lighter outlet. *Any* car would be able to do the same, on probably the same amount of gas, or close to it. The bells & whistles like regenerative braking that gives the Prius a high number of miles per gallon don't mean squat when all you're doing is using the gas engine to drive your alternator. Whoever wrote this article is a moron, or maybe he's just a reporter.
- Mono1ith, on 12/28/2008, -1/+11Why would you need to run your freezer during an ice storm?
- ross., on 12/28/2008, -8/+17"Most of which require less fuel than the Prius"
Most?? MOST?? SOME cars maybe...some DIESEL cars. - ross., on 12/28/2008, -0/+9You do realise Priuses (Priuii?) require an energy source don't you?
- dasunst3r, on 12/28/2008, -1/+10Yep, and I suspect that he'd need a darn powerful inverter. I wonder how this guy hooked it up.
- oboshoe, on 12/28/2008, -0/+8While I really hate to get behind a prius in the fast lane, with the driver playing the dashboard video game....this is pretty cool.
- barnis, on 12/28/2008, -5/+13worst article ever
- sourceholder, on 12/28/2008, -1/+8Mirror | ɿoɿɿiM
http://CommunityMirror.ath.cx/p/harvardpress.com/F ... - 80hd, on 12/28/2008, -2/+9even if he needed a constant kilowatt, the motor would be off most of the time.
If the engine put out only 40hp during charging and somehow all of it was perfectly stored and released in the batteries....
40 hp * 121 seconds = 1002.55205 watt hours.
Most engines use about a gallon per hour (even though most engines are Otto cycle unlike the the Prius's Atkinson) so if you round to 4 minutes per hour of charging you get 1.6 gallons per day you end up at 4.8 gallons.
Yeah I think about miles and gallons incessantly when I get stuck driving alone :( - meghalc, on 12/28/2008, -6/+12How old are you?
- tankd0g, on 12/28/2008, -1/+7$150 1000W inverter. I have one in my Rav4. I've run the essentials off it many times. I also have a remote starter installed which will start the car if it senses a drop in voltage below 12.3v. (12.65v is the optimal charged voltage). I can't run the fridge and the furnace at once but I can run either or.
- siyab, on 12/28/2008, -2/+8LYK OMGZZ YOU'RE NOT SO KEWL!!! OMFG!!11!!ONE!!
- TheGuruStud, on 12/28/2008, -1/+6Does not need to be a freakin prius POS.
Any normal alternator is going to be able to handle a 90 amp load for quite some time. Of course, you'll need higher rpms to max out the alternator, but 30 amps is a good bet at idle. Combine that with a decent battery and any ol ***** car will do just fine.
You can run pretty large speaker systems off stock alternators for a long time before they die. - xaxxon, on 12/28/2008, -3/+8it was not clear that the car was automatically turning on its engine to recharge the batteries. It just says that the engine ran periodically to charge them. Doesn't say he didn't have to go out there and turn it on himself.
- ThinkOutTheBox, on 12/28/2008, -0/+5Since we are in America our measurment systems are different like car motors are rated in Horsepower, go anywhere they have he metric system and you will notice that the power ratings for cars are measured in Kw.
The Prius electric drive puts out 35 hp or 26 Kw of power. So yes it is completely possible, also look up generators you can buy one for about 300 bucks that does 3600 watts and that only has 6.5 hp. A kilowatt of power sounds like a lot put it really isn't. - TheGuruStud, on 12/28/2008, -1/+5Me thinks you have no clue what you're talking about.
- smitty72, on 12/28/2008, -1/+5For a regular inverter that you can buy from radioshack, just about any car can do the job, unless its alternator is overloaded. A diesel truck would likely do it. The engine is still going to have to do just as much work to charge the batteries, whether its running for 5 minutes or constant, it would burn just as much fuel, its high school physics...
That said, I would like to see someone take this a little further, the inverter is a redundant idea, but I wonder how easily you can get into the alternator to get an ac feed straight out? Cuts two steps out (rectified to DC and being digitally reinverted back to AC) increasing effeciency, but makes the frequency a little less stable (cruise control?), useless for alarm clocks, but fine if you're only running lights and some heat. - ElRayQuieres, on 12/28/2008, -0/+4Evidently no one else has seen Jeff Dunham on Comedy Central.
- nogami, on 12/28/2008, -0/+4Huh? Require "less" fuel than the Prius? I don't know if you're uninformed or just trolling, but having a car that runs the engine for around 5 minutes every half hour to keep the batteries fully charged uses substantially less gas than "any other" car out there.
The car's main battery (~250 volt) is stepped down through an internal system to 12v, which is what his inverter was running off of. When the main battery drops too low, the engine kicks in and recharges the battery back up to normal. The Prius power management computer is very conservative about the battery levels. It would never let the battery drain enough to become damaged.
And for the other poster - it won't do a damn thing to ruin the batteries. In fact it's substantially less load than powering the electric engine in the car during normal driving. An inverter's power usage would be a trickle by comparison. - jhandfield, on 12/28/2008, -0/+4Guess the Prius finally lost the fight.
- meghalc, on 12/28/2008, -2/+5No *****! I wonder if the OP even read the freakin article before he making that Title!
- Oxidizer, on 12/28/2008, -0/+3Thank you for echoing my first thought. I feel like I have known you for 3 years.
- pipebender, on 12/28/2008, -2/+5"Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me."
The fridge was probly never turned ON because of the sub-freezing temp it was operating under. - LavaWarrior, on 12/28/2008, -2/+5Do you make those same sounds?
- Dou6, on 12/28/2008, -5/+8Likely a diesel truck engine would have been more efficient.
- flegory, on 12/28/2008, -0/+3http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/prius ...
- Hoogie7Dowser, on 12/28/2008, -1/+3Where is your god now?
- sourceholder, on 12/28/2008, -1/+3Mirror | ɿoɿɿiM
http://CommunityMirror.ath.cx/p/harvardpress.com/F ... - Leprince, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2I see your point.
- katatoniq, on 12/28/2008, -24/+26Hate to break it to you but any car could do that, most of which requiring less fuel than the Prius.
- MWeather, on 12/28/2008, -0/+2Isn't it SUPPOSED to act as a generator? I know the hybrid Silverado does.
- oxymoron69, on 12/28/2008, -2/+4Are you mentally retarded?
You seem to be lost, please press alt + F4 for help. - TheGuruStud, on 12/28/2008, -1/+3True, but it also sounds like they really didn't pull much power. Slap a deep cell or two in the trunk and I wouldn't use but a few gallons, as well.
- fishbulb95, on 12/29/2008, -0/+2Why hell would you need to run a refrigerator if it's already freezing outside. I would just put my goods in a really cold spot in the house or the garage. Hell toss them outside in the snow, and when you want something, just pull it out an hour before using.
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