It should be fine, but you will pay a penalty if you turn the car off, then on again after some time because of the warmup cycle. Very intelligent generators can do a similar thing if they have an inverter and battery bank so that during low load times it will shut down the engine and let the battery supply power so that the engine only needs to run in it's peak efficiency, kind of like pulse & glide driving for generating electricity.

The Prius will start the engine to charge the traction battery when it gets low enough, but it won't let it get so low that it will cause memory because "empty" on the screen is actually 40%, and full is actually 80% real capacity. The battery ECU won't let you hurt the traction battery, but the accessory (12v lead-acid) battery can be killed easily when the car is off.

 

So when I run juice off the DC plug (with an AC inverter) with car powered on is it pulling off accessory or main battery? If its off the accessory only, its got to be running a lot to keep it charged... (?)

In terms of that, could I hook up a couple car batteries to the AC inverter and charge them off the Prius when running and then draw them down after I turn off the car?

 

There are only two ways to extract significant electrical power from Prius. One is to leave it in "ready" and accept the 1 kw available from the 12 v bus. The other is to dig into the high voltage world, where 5kw or more might be sourced; for that see

http://www.priups.com/

In the former case, tapping the 1 kw requires you to buy a DC to AC inverter, use fat wires for connection to near the 12 v battery add a fuse (please!), and never turn off you car while the power drain exists. You would not deplete your high voltage battery thisaway, but the 12 v battery will sink rapidly.

Please notice that there are two flavors of DC to AC inverters. 'Modified sine wave' being the cheaper. "'Pure sine wave' will cost much more, but will operate all your gadgets without complaint.

DAS

 

The car (when on) supplies the accessory battery with up to 100 amps of 12v power from the HV battery, and the car will start the ICE and charge the HV battery only when needed.

You could do this if you wanted to be able to turn the car off, but if you don't mind leaving the car on, you don't need extra 12v batteries.

 

Have you ever heard of the Toyota Dream House PAPI?
http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/toyo...housepapi.html

It is a prototype house for year 2010.
There is also a prototype Prius which can supply 3kW electricity to the house for 36 hours a tank.

I do know nothing detail about the prototype Prius, so please not ask any questions about the price, parts number, availabe schedule or anything.

Ken@Japan

 

Thanks for the good info, and the Prius powered house is a great idea. I looked at that. If the plug-in Prius ever happens, we'll have 180 mpg cars that can act as APU's.

I'm afraid I won't be hacking into the main battery power. I have a feeling Toyota service take a very *dim* view of this, and I'm not feeling this adventurous.


So basically the Prius main battery is a pass-through from the generator to the accessory battery. I need to test it before I head out. It will be interesting to see how many hours I can get off, say half a tank of gas.

1000 watts is adequate My goal is to use a lot of low power stuff like some LED xmas lights and a couple CF lamps and recharge my portable electronics, but no power strips that might tempt my campmates to get crazy plugging in.

I guess I'll have to leave the hair dryer home