37 ms·

Just for comparison, the extended-range Ford Lightning pickup truck (the one that can power a home for three days) has a 131 kWh battery.

• InefficientRed 4y ago
  F150 is 98 kWh standard range, 131 extended. But the important point is this sentence: Toyota explained that the system supports supplying power from hybrid electric vehicles Presumably, this means you have a short, medium, and long option for emergency power: - short: the battery - medium: the battery + your car's battery - long: use your ($25K) Prius as a gas generator to power your home for as long as necessary. This seems like a more versatile setup than the e F150 at least for my use cases (rural WV -- power might be out for long periods but I can always get gas). It'll be interesting to see the price range of course, but this could be a good "mostly battery + gas if needed" backup option to compete with the diesel generator situation now. And of course the eF150 isn't really a good backup power (or transportation!) option in my case. The eF150 generator use case always seemed like suburban prepper fantasy bullshit. The actual use case is for running power tools on site.
  • brtkdotse 4y ago
    I’m planning for solar cells and looked into the possibility of running my house as a micro grid (ie disconnect it from the main grid) in case of a prolonged power outage. Turns out that unless you redneck engineer it, running your house without a main grid to synchronize to is very costly - among other things you need to supply your own grid grounding and that could easily run into the high €x000.
    • GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
      > you need to supply your own grid grounding What does this mean? My naive reading would presume a stake in the ground?
      • dmoy 4y ago
        Depends on how much electricity is involved. Might require more than a simple stake
        • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
          What’s more ? Curious what it takes for large setups.
          • durnygbur 4y ago
            A big ass steel anchor damn deep in the ground!
          • harveywi 4y ago
            Proof of stake.
          • AdrianB1 4y ago
            You need to put as much as needed to achieve 4 Ohm to ground or less. This can be up to ~ 10 stakes at a couple of meter interval, it depends a lot on the soil type.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • thesmok 4y ago
            For individual homes, it often takes three stakes, each several meters long (deep), placed in a triangular config, connected above ground.
      • mellavora 4y ago
        a stake which doesn't corrode. For fun, put a nail in dirt. See how long it lasts.
      • korlja 4y ago
        Stake in the ground, as the sister post said, non-corroding, in the simplest case. But there is more to it: The stake has to have permanent contact to some electrically conductive layer in the ground, so you need to take geology and local climate into account. In central europe, with generally wet climate, you just need to reach the year-long stable, frost-free, local water table at a depth of (usually) between 1m and 10m. If you cannot reach sufficient depth, don't know the required depth, a simple stake isn't going to cut it. Because in case of an electrical fault, the grounding has to withstand and dissipate in the order of a few hundred Ampere. To achieve that you then shallowly bury lines of non-corroding material in a grid, or bury a grounding net something like 1 to 2m deep over an area of 100m^2 to 10000m^2. If you are on sandy or rocky ground, permafrost, arid climate and no handy body of water is nearby for grounding, you need to have a far larger grounding net or use conductivity-enhancing methods like permanent watering, adding salts or carbon to the soil or replacing it outright with something more conductive. In all, very expensive. And as for large installations, you just measure the soil conductivity, calculate the necessary grounding current and scale up the aforementioned methods.
    • pulse7 4y ago
      In Europe (EU) every house needs own grounding. You are not allowed to ground on main grid's ground. We have three cables: 1) power 2) zero (=main grid's grounding) 3) own grounding. Only old installations are allowed to connect grounding to zero which is called something like "zeroing".
      • cillian64 4y ago
        In the UK, which was until very recently in the EU, most modern (last 20-30 years) houses have what’s called Protective Multiple Earthing where the house earth is just connected to the incoming neutral and there’s no earth spike at the house. Then the power company earth-bonds at the substation and several points between the substation and houses.
        • michaelt 4y ago
          Don't most UK houses also have earth bonded to all the water and gas pipes in the house? There may be no earth spike, but if earth connects to a copper pipe going into the ground, you'd expect them to be at the same potential.
          • jon_adler 4y ago
            I believe metal pipe bonding is a building control requirement however many new builds use predominantly plastic pipe work. The requirement is to protect the occupant against touching live metal pipe work, not to earth the house.
            • yrro 4y ago
              Gas pipes can't be plastic!
      • AdrianB1 4y ago
        At the first electrical panel in many cases the grid's neutral is connected to the house grounding, this is done in new houses in my country as standard.
    • andreareina 4y ago
      You also need a transfer switch to make sure you're disconnected from the grid otherwise you're going to be feeding power back into lines that are supposed to be dead.
  • toast0 4y ago
    > The eF150 generator use case always seemed like suburban prepper fantasy bullshit. The actual use case is for running power tools on site. I think the Hybrid F150 / generator case is pretty decent; not so sure about the EV only generator one, but running tools could be useful. Rolling a truck over to my well when the power goes out will be a lot nicer than rolling out a portable generator by hand. Could be maybe useful for cell towers that rely on generators driven to the site during outages as well; although that depends on if they usually drop off a generator on a trailer and let it sit without local supervision or if they stay with the generator. My well servicing company has a box truck with a generator in the back, that they use to confirm that the problem isn't related to utility electric service; not sure if a built up f-150 would be sufficient for their storage/transport needs though.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Running your home off your car's combustion engine sounds like exactly the wrong way around. I want a battery that allows me to save days worth of power from solar panels to use during cloudy days.
    • koonsolo 4y ago
      Isn't adding more panels a better solution? How else are you going to bridge over the winter?
      • mcv 4y ago
        More panels don't help if you can't store it. Well, I suppose if you have enough panels to generate power even on short, cloudy winter days, then that doesn't matter anymore; then you just need enough storage for the night. But then what are you going to do with all the surplus power on sunny summer days? Some sort of cheap long term storage would really help a lot.
        • koonsolo 4y ago
          Yes, I get it, it's indeed a lot of surplus in the summer. Long term storage would be the better solution, but batteries don't seems to be able to store a large amount of energy anyway. So in my opinion, it's really a tradeoff. Maybe mine some bitcoins during summer? ;)
          • hedora 4y ago
            I looked into this. Even assuming PG&E's buy back rate is 50% of current numbers, the ASICs have an expected profitability horizon of over one year of uptime. I'm not convinced they'll be profitable much longer after that, since hash/kWh keeps improving. Also, I bought the panels to reduce carbon emissions, and would rather sell the power back.
        • hedora 4y ago
          At least for our install, we spent about half the money on batteries and half on solar. It fairly reliably gets through the night unless we run the AC (but those are sunny days) or charge the car (car batteries are about the same size as the house batteries). On a cloudy day, the panels provide 90% of our normal power usage. Anyway, to scale it up, we'd want to increase panels and also batteries. Increasing only one would leave us with no power at dawn or with a large battery that would never reach 100% in winter. One night of batteries with panels that reliably provide enough electricity to get the batteries to 100% is a good tradeoff for sunny climates. As it gets cloudier, batteries might have more incremental benefit, but multi-day storage probably doesn't make sense. Also, you can tie a gas/propane generator to the battery to handle the "a few times a year" cases. That's probably less carbon intensive than 5x-ing the system for 1% of the days. (Since the 1% days for us are in winter, we have a wood stove.)
  • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Let me introduce you to the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast of the United States of America, where people often run generators intermittently for weeks after a hurricane in order to keep their refrigerators and freezers cold until power can be fully restored.
    • InefficientRed 4y ago
      > days or weeks The eF150 gives you a couple days. The Prius is a better solution if you really need backup power.
      • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        They're not running it non-stop though. They run it about 4 times a day for an hour each time, and ONLY for those appliances.
        • InefficientRed 4y ago
          In that case, the prius prime battery alone is probably sufficient for several days. And it's 30K less than the eF150. And you can actually buy one off the lot today. :)
  • smt88 4y ago
    > The eF150 generator use case always seemed like suburban prepper fantasy bullshit. Perhaps you didn't hear about the millions of people who were miserable (and several who died) because their power grid is run by morons[1]. Losing power for three days may have been unusual for a long time, but with the combination of radical/unaccountable government, climate change, and aging energy infrastructure, it's easy to imagine that a lot of the warmer parts of the US are at some risk. 1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/19/texas-emergency-communication-power-outages/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/19/texas-emergency-comm...
    • nxm 4y ago
      • 1234letshaveatw 4y ago
        thou shall not deviate from the narrative!
      • richiebful1 4y ago
        It's possible that both blue and red states are incompetent at managing vital infrastructure
        • smt88 4y ago
          This does not seem to be true, at least when it comes to the power grid. Red states dominate the list of worst-run grids[1]. 1. https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/ https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/
      • namecheapTA 4y ago
        I live about an hour from San Francisco and my power goes out about once a quarter for several hours. It's not the end of the world, but twice in the last year it happened while I was making dinner. A weird feeling to realize I can't even make food without the governments help.
  • smeej 4y ago
    I already have a 2000W inverter wired to my Prius' 12v battery. Pop the car in ready mode and I can run things off it for ages, and then unplug them and go refuel the car if needed. Having the extra storage battery mounted at my house would be cool and all I guess, but you don't need this to back up your house's power supply with a Prius. (I live in a small, simple house and only run the blower fan for my propane heating system, my refrigerator, my freezer, and a lamp off the inverter. I suppose if you had much more complex power needs, the battery would be a larger advantage, but for emergency power outages, it keeps me from freezing or losing all my food.)
    • adolph 4y ago
      Would you share general info about your Prius setup? I was looking at the below. https://www.plugoutpower.com/inverters https://www.plugoutpower.com/inverters > unplug them and go refuel the car if needed Just like standalone generators, this is a tough point. Fuel can become hard to source during a an outage > 5-7 days.
      • smeej 4y ago
        Honestly I kinda already did. Connect 2000W pure sine inverter to terminals on 12v battery in trunk. Plug in extension cord. It's not terribly sophisticated, but it keeps my pipes from freezing. Refueling a car is as easy as it gets, though. To refuel anything else, you'd have to put it in a car and take it to the fueling station anyway. This way you just refuel the car the normal way. You can also store whatever gasoline you'd have used in a generator at home too, but the Prius' 10.9 gallon tank holds a lot more than your average portable generator and runs a good, long while.
• isoprophlex 4y ago
  Three days with 131 kWh?! Where do you live, a castle? My home uses 6-8 kWh/day...
  • shiftpgdn 4y ago
    I do about 100kWh/day but I have a 4000 sqft house in an city that’s 100F with 100% humidity half the year and I have two electric cars.
    • Diesel555 4y ago
      I just ran my last year's electricity. I'm around 26 kWh/d in the DC area in an old inefficient house around 1500 ft^2. While it had a gas stove, gas water heating, and gas house heating, it did have electric window AC units. I'd be really interested in how the previous author had 6-8 kWh/d.
      • zbrozek 4y ago
        I used about 8 KWh/day when I lived alone in a 1550 sqft townhouse with gas heat and cooking. That ran my IT equipment, refrigerator, and blower fans for heating and exhaust. No AC usage. Now I'm in single family home and my energy use is bonkers, but most of that is heating while I'm missing part of my roof and an entire exterior wall. It should be criminal for a town to take two years to approve permits.
      • kalnins 4y ago
        I'm using 5-7 kWh/d. Pretty constant. Includes washing machine and induction stove, but excludes heating the apartment and hot water.
    • 14 4y ago
      My last bill I ran 95kWh/day. Smaller house but have several adults and even more kids who all shower and do laundry as well as other things. I wish I could get it down half as much I don't see how I could at this point.
• martin_a 4y ago
  Just to add a point as everybody is going on about how much they use per day or what: You are expected to generate power, too. With a battery around 9 kWh, you'll probably install a solar system around 3 times as big or sth. like that. So those capacity has to buffer for the night time when you're sleeping, heating probably goes somewhat down, nobody is cooking on 4 induction plates etc. pp.
  • Angostura 4y ago
    I'm in a relatively small UK house. Selling power back to the grid doesn't get you lots of money these days, so the emphasis is on using batteries for night time use. Running off-grid isn't really something that is done, in urnban areas anyway. Heating is gas, the hob is gas I have 3kW panels and a 5KWh battery. During the summer hot water is heated through an immersion heater from solar - my electricity bill is roughly zero and I get to sell a bit back. During the winter - forget about it.
    • martin_a 4y ago
      That's exactly how you should do it, I think. Generate as much power as you can use for yourself, fill a battery for the night, repeat that cycle. My landlord installed a 30 kW peak solar system (two households, six childs/people), installed a heat pump and insulated some walls that were not insulated before. Surely a hefty invest, but external power usage has dropped pretty much to zero from February to October. Even after that it's minimal.
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  But that's an entire pickup truck... and when it comes to quality, service, ethics etc. there's a world of difference between Japan and the USA.
• kkfx 4y ago
  There is no reason for such comparison: the point of a small battery is ensure 24h full autonomy for critical loads (fridge, freezer, VMC if it's a new home, lights, computers etc. Batteries are NOT cheap so choosing to limit what's backed up is reasonable. After, for far bigger backups, a vehicle might be a gamechanger: it need anyway a far bigger battery for it's own performance, so battery costs does not matter much for the use-case and using it once you own the battery...
• elif 4y ago
  Emergency backup and daily power distribution/arbitrage/peak offset are different use-cases entirely. Also the not-produced platinum model you reference will sell for 150k+ so the price comparison isn't really valid either. Lastly, home batteries have the potential to pay for themselves over time, making the economic models radically different.