Using your EV to demo Emergency Power. I powered last night's Climate Stewards Annapolis Monthly Meeting from my EV.
I rigged my VOLT right out front on the sidewalk with yellow lights blinking, and then an extension cord coming out of my trunk and conspicuously run through the front door and plugged into the first outlet. I had visited the day before, and moved that outlet's wire at the circuit breaker over onto the same circuit as the meeting room's lights. This way the lights and that outlet were on the same circuit. So All I had to do on meeting night was flip that breaker off (and tag it out) and then backfeed the outlet. Then without detracting from the other speakers and the agenda for the meeting, I was able to include the following summary in my 30 second intro: "Although our building is solar powered and we now have ten EV charging outlets in the parking lot, a few people ask about emergency power when the grid goes down. So tonight I am demonstrating the powering of this building from the Volt parked outside. Total cost is about a $200 common inverter hooked to the Volt's battery. At the average American 1kW load, the EV should be able to power the house for about an hour and only use up about 5 miles range. And for long term outages, I can just plug the Volt into the solar panels "secure power" outlet and charge it during the day and so on indefinitely while the grid is down". Turns out, I used up about 15 miles of range in 2.5 hours. Because I overlooked the typical system overhead of the Volt which should have been about 1 mile per hour. But I did discover the no-driver-timeout to be about 2 hours. Right at the end of the meeting, as people were rising to leave, the lights went out. The volt had just turned itself off. A quick run to the car to push the power button again was all that was needed. Anyway, the main meeting rooms fluorescent load was on the order of 1 kW, just at the limit of my 1 kW inverter. But when we replace them all with LED's that will be down to about 500W and then I can combine that with the lobby LED light circuit and have all those most important lights on one circuit and one outlet for future emergency operation. I have been to Home Depot now 6 times and bought three different types of tube bulbs, but stil have not found ANY that will work. With or without ballast. Though I was only buying their cheapest. Next, Ill go get the box of NO BALLAST bulbs and that should work. Oh, the room has 3 different light circuits, so there was always backup. I was powering the main cove lighting. Then there are accent lights around the walls and dome lights way u p in the ceiling. We left the accent lights on the grid so that I wouldn't leave them completely in the dark if my system failed. And we leave them on anyway even during movies... So, I got to score additional visibility each time the speaker went from talking, to her three different movie clips by jumping up each time and going to the light switch to turn off the lights and comment "just saving some more miles"... The audience really got into it... Bob _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
