Regular cars are very inefficient at the job. Mine maths out to somewhere around 7% efficiency from fuel-to-electrical-power (and without yet involving the necessary inverter).
But for generating electrical power, PHEVs have very different tricks than a typical-and-pedestrian sleepy belt-driven alternator has.
Any pointers on a candidate model, or range of models, that include this function as a built-in intent?
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I was tempted to get into the maths of using a regular gas-fired car intermittently to charge batteries. Maybe with something like an Anker Solix that has enough surge capacity to start a normal-ish furnace blower or fridge compressor, and can accept ~800W of power from a running car's 12v system for charging and/or output.
The temptation persists to write further about that kind of concept at some point, but the previous comment was getting long-enough that people tend to tune out anyway.
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Except, as an aside: After the 2012 derecho where my neighborhood was without power for a couple of weeks, a neighbor down the block from me parked a minty-looking John Deere tractor in his driveway. This was connected, via PTO, to a rather beefy generator.
That combination (a tractor with a PTO is meant to do stationary-engine duty while doing significant work) sure did look expensive to keep going.
But it was still humming along every time I went past, so it must have been working for him.
(And during that outage, the big corpo gas station just a few blocks further out grew a genset the size of a shipping container that powered their operation. After they got that going, which took a couple of days from the start of the blackout, they were running very normally. IIRC it took them more days to get it disconnected and shut down than to get it delivered and set up, but it worked, and we all had fuel nearby.)
That'd be a great option to explore!
Regular cars are very inefficient at the job. Mine maths out to somewhere around 7% efficiency from fuel-to-electrical-power (and without yet involving the necessary inverter).
But for generating electrical power, PHEVs have very different tricks than a typical-and-pedestrian sleepy belt-driven alternator has.
Any pointers on a candidate model, or range of models, that include this function as a built-in intent?
---
I was tempted to get into the maths of using a regular gas-fired car intermittently to charge batteries. Maybe with something like an Anker Solix that has enough surge capacity to start a normal-ish furnace blower or fridge compressor, and can accept ~800W of power from a running car's 12v system for charging and/or output.
The temptation persists to write further about that kind of concept at some point, but the previous comment was getting long-enough that people tend to tune out anyway.
---
Except, as an aside: After the 2012 derecho where my neighborhood was without power for a couple of weeks, a neighbor down the block from me parked a minty-looking John Deere tractor in his driveway. This was connected, via PTO, to a rather beefy generator.
That combination (a tractor with a PTO is meant to do stationary-engine duty while doing significant work) sure did look expensive to keep going.
But it was still humming along every time I went past, so it must have been working for him.
(And during that outage, the big corpo gas station just a few blocks further out grew a genset the size of a shipping container that powered their operation. After they got that going, which took a couple of days from the start of the blackout, they were running very normally. IIRC it took them more days to get it disconnected and shut down than to get it delivered and set up, but it worked, and we all had fuel nearby.)