Coast Resorts Open Roads Forum: Tesla Semi truck unveil & test ride set for Oct 26th !

Reisender wrote:

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:

free radical wrote:

Tesla cars save lives in Texas blackout

Amazing!

Ok, you can all call us fanboys.

Just 17% usage at camping mode? DW can kick me out of the bed and the house and I wouldn't mind. [emoticon]

We get the occasional power outage here due to electrical storms or cars crashing into poles or even the odd wind event. Usually no more than 4 or 6 hours but occasionally longer. BC is pretty much 100 percent hydro so pretty reliable power, lots of it and cheap cheap. We are also hot in the summer and a fridge/freezer full of food could spoil if the timing was bad. We had a leftover inverter from a previously RV so we built a little UPS dedicated to powering the fridge and one plug in the living room so we can watch TV etc and have one light on in the living room. Its pretty basic, consists of a couple 31 AGM batts and a 2 KW inverter charger with dedicated wiring to the two important plugs. Lasts about a day to day and a half...ish. Here it is.

Then we started to think about a Texas situation where it could go down for longer, and how we could utilize Jarvis (wifes Tesla) to extend the UPS duration. Tesla doesn't like people connecting to the 12 volt battery directly but are okay with using the 12 volt power point in the car during camp mode. So we got a small 300 watt sine wave inverter and a 7 amp smart battery charger which is in turn connected to the big UPS which does all the heavy lifting.
Extremely inefficient way to do things but worked. As long as it is in camp mode the DC to DC converter in the Tesla will keep the 12 volt battery in the Tesla charged and of course the power point powered up. We ran a one day test and with the normal loads the big UPS has to deal with the Tesla kept the two big AGM's from depleting at all. It only used about 8 percent of Teslas battery per day so probably an 8 or 9 day UPS. Horribly inefficient as camp mode keeps the whole car powered up with basic functions including climate control on.

Anyway, even in winter we would be fine for awhile. We have a couple backup heaters and access to half a dozen propane tanks so no worries of freezing. Hoping to never use it but it was an interesting proof of concept test.

Here is a picture of the two devices we used to keep the big UPS charged during the test. We used a meter and it pulled a constant 9.6 amps from the Tesla power point which is rated for 12 constant and 16 max. Essentially power comes in the left as 120 from the tesla and heads to the big AGM's as DC.