How I Prepared My 2012 Prius Hybrid For Use As An Emergency Generator To Run My Refrigerator In A Power Outage. (Long)

[CrankyMa]

I'm in Texas and we recently lost power for days due to a small hurricane. I had heard one could use a Prius Hybrid vehicle as an emergency power source and after the most recent few hot and humid days without power and losing all of our refrigerated food, I decided to look into this idea further.

Texas' "electrical grid independence" and its handling of some recent weather events has not inspired confidence in me that we can rely on our leaders to keep our infrastructure up-to-date. While I'm grateful that we did not suffer any personal physical damage or major damage to our home, the physical discomfort and the monetary damage in lost food was difficult.

I'm now set up to power my refrigerator using some relatively inexpensive items that can also be easily added to and removed from the car and that are small enough to store in a box in a closet when not in use. The materials for this project cost $277. I think that if I can save just one refrigerator's worth of food one time, the cost of these emergency power supplies will have earned their keep.

The best part about using my hybrid as an emergency generator include that already own the car so do not have to spend several hundred dollars on a gasoline generator. I also do not have to store gallons of volatile and limited shelf-life gasoline and oil in my garage. Gas is hard to find and purchase when the city has no power.

Other benefits of using the car as a generator include that the car is cleaner (less CO2), quieter, and far, far more fuel efficient than a gasoline-powered generator. A gas generator uses between one half to one gallon of gasoline per hour, or 12 to 24 gallons of gasoline a day. My 4 hour test of this new system estimates that I will use about 2.4 gallons of gas in 24 hours making the car-as-generator budget friendly.

While the 800 to 1,000 Watts my car can provide will not power my whole home, I discovered that even after powering my refrigerator I still have enough Wattage left over to operate other items such as fans, lights, computers, to charge phones and batteries, and even cook or warm food with some limitations.

If you would like to learn more about this project and what it can do, click here or search "How I Prepared My 2012 Prius Hybrid For Use As An Emergency Generator To Run My Refrigerator In A Power Outage. (Long)"

https://imgur.com/gallery/how-i-prepared-2012-prius-hybrid-use-as-emergency-generator-to-run-refrigerator-power-outage-long-nX7t5ly]