powersurge wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 1:31 pm
I don't see why people are investing so much time, $$$, and possible damage to an expensive car just to play with powering some home appliances.
You want to power your house, do it right. Want to power some lights, get an $89 Harbor Freight generator. Want to power the house, get a 7000 to 10,000 watt gas generator and install a power switch into your house... Quick, easy, safe, and ready to use at a moment's notice when you need it.
All that junk that you may get for the Leaf is a waste of money if you never use it, and a serious investment because it has only one use. You can keep, move or sell a regular powerful gas generator in a day if you ever sell the car.
What $89 generator are you talking about? The cheapest one I see is $125 at
https://www.harborfreight.com/engines-g ... =price-low and it'd be a horrific polluter being a 2 cycle engine.
Long ago before I got an inverter to use with my Bolt, I looked into stuff like a $500
https://www.harborfreight.com/engines-g ... 62523.html. But then I looked into the manual for the prep if you don't use for 20+ days on page 17 of
https://manuals.harborfreight.com/manua ... /62523.pdf and stuff like "NOTiCE: During extended storage periods the Engine must be started every 3months and allowed to run for 15 – 20minutes or the Warranty is VOID." And, it only has a 90 day warranty.

Do I really want to spend $500 on something w/that short a warranty from a company that sells somewhat sketchy products as it is?
It's also over 50 lbs, so I'd likely need help in getting it home and back out of my car.
I have to worry about gasoline going bad and safely transporting and storing enough of it for a multi-day outage. The manual alludes to 12 hours of runtime (1 gallon of gasoline) at 25% load. I don't even have any gasoline powered cars at home. And, fuel consumption is kinda high. I'd need to worry about maintenance on page 13. I have to run it outside. I intend to (and did run) my NVR security camera system the whole time when I'm at home, including while sleeping. I also intended to run my fridge and I did so) This was all using my Bolt w/a Samlex pure sine wave inverter w/the car parked in my garage.
A generator MUST be outside unless I want to be poisoned by CO. But, since it's outside and is noisy, it might be stolen in the event of
https://www.pge.com/psps/. Both times I lost power (which could be days long outages), my ENTIRE neighborhood was out. In the 2nd PSPS that happened at end of last month, my power went out on a Saturday night and didn't return until Monday 7 pm (
https://mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=571661#p571661). We've been told to prepare for multi-day outages as the high fire risk event must pass, the lines must be inspected and any damage repaired before they're re-energized.
People on Priuschat have used inverters with their Prius for ages and the fuel consumption isn't bad but the car must be outside due to CO emissions.
I don't own the house I live in and it's likely I'll need to move within a year or two. I anticipated needing to move a few years ago into an apartment but that hasn't happened (long story).
There are probably more reasons for my case but I won't be able to elaborate on them until later tonight.