First off, I was not in the direct path of Hurricane Ian, but if you can find a charity (give send go, go fund me, etc.) for people in the devastation zones please drop them a few bucks... but verify it isn't a scammer first.
On to my story. My wife reports that there were high winds and heavy rain throughout the night Wednesday night here in my area of Florida... but I snored my way through them and never noticed
Yesterday as Hurricane Ian was approaching I texted my wife from work to plug in our spare refrigerator that lives in the garage, I figured it would be much easier to transfer food after cooling it down all day and power that fridge if needed rather than running an extension cord into the house and moving the fridge out from the wall so I could move the plug to the extension cord. When I got home I took the Bolt off of Hill Top Reserve mode (HTR reserves battery capacity for regen if you live at the top of a hill, charges to 88% SOC) and charged it up to 100% for only the second time since getting the new battery pack.
As evening approached and more and more reports of power outages even in areas not in the direct path of the storm came in I decided to set up my inverter on the Bolt. Half way through getting it set up the lights went out!
I have a 1000W pure sign wave inverter that I can run off of the Bolt, or off of a battery bank I have set up that has four 75 amp hour deep cycle 12V batteries (3.6 kWh) for if / when I have to drive the car. The battery bank is probably only actually good for 2 kWh since it is made up of the old batteries I removed from my Ryobi riding lawn mower when I upgraded it to 100 amp hour batteries... but if needed I can pull those new batteries out and make an new 4.8 kWh 12V bank... it would just be a massive pain in the butt
After power went out at 9:45ish PM, I had the inverter powered up and supplying the fridge only for over night. In 12 hours it consumed 3.9 kWh out of the (thanks to the recall) brand new 66 kWh traction battery. That would give me the ability to power just the fridge for 8 days. When running, the fridge is only consuming 144 watts of power according to my clamp on meter, and much less when the compressor is off. Figure a 50% duty cycle for the compressor and you chop that down to 75 watts, that clamp on meter reading includes the losses in the inverter so you can figure a bit more than half of that power was consumed by the car computer systems remaining active. Looks like around 175 watts to power the car systems with climate control off and the entertainment system set to low power mode. That is much less than I expected.
People in the direct path will be out of power for that long (8 days) or worse, but I expect my area to regain power sooner than that, also I will have the ability to charge the Bolt at work while the 3.6 kWh battery pack keeps the fridge cold, so I decided to hook up a few "luxury" items... I plugged in my router and modem and to my surprise I have internet! I was getting nothing on my 4G phone internet connection, so having the home internet available is wonderful.
First thing I did was check weather updates and hurricane news, second stop was the Bolt forum and then hear to tell about my inverter use
Using an inverter off of the 12V battery in the Bolt is common knowledge for the tinkering type of Bolt owners, I assume there is something similar that can be done with the Y if mine had not been in the body shop for rear hatch repair / replacement? If so, how much power can you draw without killing the 12V battery? On the Bolt, you can do around 1.5 KW continuous load max.
Later,
Keith
On to my story. My wife reports that there were high winds and heavy rain throughout the night Wednesday night here in my area of Florida... but I snored my way through them and never noticed
Yesterday as Hurricane Ian was approaching I texted my wife from work to plug in our spare refrigerator that lives in the garage, I figured it would be much easier to transfer food after cooling it down all day and power that fridge if needed rather than running an extension cord into the house and moving the fridge out from the wall so I could move the plug to the extension cord. When I got home I took the Bolt off of Hill Top Reserve mode (HTR reserves battery capacity for regen if you live at the top of a hill, charges to 88% SOC) and charged it up to 100% for only the second time since getting the new battery pack.
As evening approached and more and more reports of power outages even in areas not in the direct path of the storm came in I decided to set up my inverter on the Bolt. Half way through getting it set up the lights went out!
I have a 1000W pure sign wave inverter that I can run off of the Bolt, or off of a battery bank I have set up that has four 75 amp hour deep cycle 12V batteries (3.6 kWh) for if / when I have to drive the car. The battery bank is probably only actually good for 2 kWh since it is made up of the old batteries I removed from my Ryobi riding lawn mower when I upgraded it to 100 amp hour batteries... but if needed I can pull those new batteries out and make an new 4.8 kWh 12V bank... it would just be a massive pain in the butt
After power went out at 9:45ish PM, I had the inverter powered up and supplying the fridge only for over night. In 12 hours it consumed 3.9 kWh out of the (thanks to the recall) brand new 66 kWh traction battery. That would give me the ability to power just the fridge for 8 days. When running, the fridge is only consuming 144 watts of power according to my clamp on meter, and much less when the compressor is off. Figure a 50% duty cycle for the compressor and you chop that down to 75 watts, that clamp on meter reading includes the losses in the inverter so you can figure a bit more than half of that power was consumed by the car computer systems remaining active. Looks like around 175 watts to power the car systems with climate control off and the entertainment system set to low power mode. That is much less than I expected.
People in the direct path will be out of power for that long (8 days) or worse, but I expect my area to regain power sooner than that, also I will have the ability to charge the Bolt at work while the 3.6 kWh battery pack keeps the fridge cold, so I decided to hook up a few "luxury" items... I plugged in my router and modem and to my surprise I have internet! I was getting nothing on my 4G phone internet connection, so having the home internet available is wonderful.
First thing I did was check weather updates and hurricane news, second stop was the Bolt forum and then hear to tell about my inverter use
Using an inverter off of the 12V battery in the Bolt is common knowledge for the tinkering type of Bolt owners, I assume there is something similar that can be done with the Y if mine had not been in the body shop for rear hatch repair / replacement? If so, how much power can you draw without killing the 12V battery? On the Bolt, you can do around 1.5 KW continuous load max.
Later,
Keith
