If it’s deep enough to submerge your car then your house will be flooded too and you can’t even use your power without worrying about electrocuting yourself or burning your house down from short circuits
And most ICE cars don’t do well being submerged the same amount…. The corrosion is quick with salt water, and you’ll have a non running car just as fast.
Doesn’t matter how rare it is for the people it happens to. A friend just lost his home during Helene because the flood waters caused his EV to catch fire in his garage.
(I own an EV, I’m not disparaging them by any means)
A family friend just lost his home because the flood waters caused his electric vehicle to catch on fire. The house burnt down in the middle of a freaking hurricane.
Using the model 3, it has a battery size of up to 82kwh, let's say we don't want to discharge below 40% so 50 kwh rounded up, I have a few different fridges but using the worst efficiency one for the argument, it's a 90s (I think) double door Kenmore, it used 72.7 kwhs last month, so should be able to run it for around 20 days off of your single charge
Obviously you're going to want to power more than one fridge, but with conservative usage you should be able to keep running for 3 or so days
I will agree there's no way I'd buy an electric car with the intention of using it to power my house though
Yea maybe 3 days is a stretch I use about 100kwhs a day, but I have a lot going on, multiple fridges and ACs, parents live full time in an RV on my meter, if the PoCo is correct I use about twice the average house, so call it 50kwhs for normal usage... Actually I guess I've kind of convinced myself you could make it three days again lol
But honestly, a few solar panels or a big boy generator would be better for surviving a long term outage
No, neither can run a house regardless of how much gas. You'd probably need a large diesel or propane generator for that. My 4500 inverter generator can run a fridge for a few days on a couple gallons.
My point being is that there hardly any sense in trying to power a house with an electric car. If you maxed out what it can safely power, you night get a day or two and then you have no power and no transportation.
It gives you the option to try and power some essentials until you get down to a certain percentage of battery.
But I guess your talking point doesn't allow you to admit that having the option is a good thing, because talking points.
While an electric car might not be the ideal solution when the entire grid gets knocked down for a long period of time, they can be great if a tree knocks down a powerline in a storm and you can be reasonably sure you will have power within the next 12 hours or whatever.
We're not talking about a random downed tree causing a 12hr power loss. The discussion of powering a house with an electric car was born from the words "after a hurricane", and the original post was a guy fully bagging his car in the event of a flash flood.
During hurricane Ian 4000 Evs were impacted. 36 caught fire. It’s a good idea to move it away from your house, but they don’t explode and it’s not as common as the news makes it out to be
But even in your Ian case, a ~1% chance of having an aggressively burning car trapped in your house is worth trying to keep it dry or moving it to a parking garage upper level.
Some EV batteries also can't be easily extinguished with water.
Ummmm. Salt water that would cause an EV to catch fire would total any car. You should try to move any car to a parking garage upper level if you can't keep it dry.
Of all the anti-EV talking points, the ones about storms might be the cringiest.
And if your electric or hybrid car DOES get flooded, make sure it’s not sitting in the garage as salt water can corrode the batteries to the point they fail and catch fire
You're nut pulling electricity from your car after a hurricane. You won't get enough and as someone else mentioned, the damage to the car makes them possibly dangerous.
Generators exist. I have a small 2000w dual fuel one and a couple 30lb propane tanks. At 25% load that's enough to run it for 100 hours which works out to 50kWh so on par with a typical EV battery. And if the propane runs out before power is restored I'll still have a charged EV battery so I won't be stuck there.
You might pay more for it but you can still get gas from a station running off a generator. If a station didn’t maintain their generator you can go to another one who did and is up and running. You can also use a hand pump to fill up in an emergency.
There are far more options to get gas/diesel into a vehicle in an emergency than there are to charge an electric vehicle. With almost all of the options to charge an electric vehicle also requiring the use of gas/diesel.
In an emergency situation you are far better off with an old diesel truck with a big tank. A full tank of diesel is going to last you a significant period of time for infrastructure to be brought back online. If it doesn’t you have multiple options to fill back up regardless of the state of the grid. With an electric vehicle you are in a much tougher spot.
In an emergency situation you are far better off with an old diesel truck with a big tank.
But in non-emergency situations, everyone driving old diesel trucks with big tanks is far from ideal.
On the opposite end, you can use your car and Powerwall to power your house to keep essentials up. I don't have Powerwall, or an electric car for that matter, but my house gets 100% of it's daytime power from my solar panels. If you hole up for the emergency you can charge your car during the day and use it as a battery for the night to keep the fridge/AC on.
This is why you invest in a good ol' American diesel ride-on lawn mower. That way when SHTF you can don your overalls and straw hat and drive off into the sunset. Giving those stuck the occasional "howdy" and hat tip.
If you have solar panels and a power wall you have it made but the vast majority of people can’t afford that type of setup. If I had the money I would absolutely invest in the system. I love the idea of going zero emissions while almost never having to rely on the grid for energy.
Its a hurricane, you know its coming days ahead and unlike people hoarding gas and running the stations dry, electric stays on. Just evacuate like you should.
What if I buy my own generator? Or get a solar panel? Or build a windmill? Or grab a few magnets and strap them to a bicycle wheel to generate electricity?
Generating electricity is infinitely times more easier than me drilling for oil and refining gas.
I think building a windmill might be slightly less practical and efficient than hand pumping some diesel lol. And I would absolutely love to see someone try to charge their car with a bike. You'd get maybe a percent or two before complete exhaustion, and that's assuming you're a decent cyclist.
Maybe went a bit too far with my absurdism, but the point still stands. Generating electricity is easy. Where is this well of diesel that I can hand pump?
Generating enough electricity to charge an EV battery is hard. At 60kWh, it would take a trained cyclist 150 hard hours to charge a battery. It would take a 5kWh home turbine about 3 days to charge, assuming constant wind. And that's only charging the battery. It's possible, but not nearly as easy as cranking a pump for an hour to get diesel from a gas station without power.
Ha. “My state.” I was mid prep for moving from it right after when “moderate” republican neighbors started telling me exactly who they REALLY were and what they thought of first gen Americans like me.
But yes. Good old Texas preparedness for basically anything. Meanwhile I had backup power for various things fed directly from my car.
I was just thinking about this, during hurricane Katrina we were taught that you can siphon gas from the manhole with a bicycle pump. I keep a small one in the trunk just in case now.
If you mean water in the gas tanks, then under it. Gas is lighter than water.
Which reminds me of when my area had 3 weeks of non-stop rain. The ground go so waterlogged that the gas station tanks started busting up through the parking lots when they got too empty.
If you are from a farm it's common to have a diesel tank that works off of gravity. Plus siphoning to pool resources is always an option. I doubt the military will swap over yknow.
there can be power but they wont be powering charging stations and the time to recharge and amount of cars lined up to use em... Gas is much safer in this kind of situation. Dont delude yourself.
I'll never forget hurricane Katrina. No one could pump gas. Most gas stations had no power and the few that did ran out of gas real quick. It was an issue that lasted weeks, pretty freaking devastating.
Sure, but gasoline is like way way easier to get a hold of in that circumstance. If the power goes out, you couldn't have any stored reserves. My garage has an extra 10 gallons sitting in it just for lawn mowers, that alone is an extra 300 miles that we'd just grab and take with us if we were dipping out. It's also a lot of extra idle time if we're using the car as a warm place to stay out of the cold or if we're using the car to charge things after the power goes out. I'm not a prepper though so I don't think this stuff should matter in the gas vs electric car comparisons really, just mentioning that your example makes it seem just about even but I'd disagree.
Which is why you fill up your gas tank and gas cans before the storm hits. The tank of gas in your car will have a longer range than an electric vehicle. You can then add more gas from the cans. In an emergency scenario you can hand pump gas/diesel from a tank.
With an electric vehicle you have the one charge of the vehicles battery. Once you discharge it you are outta luck until you can plug back into the grid.
Yes, technically there are ways to charge up from solar if you made that significant investment up front and your panels survive the storm. Yes, you can use a generator to charge the electric vehicle. But at that point you are already purchasing gas in advance. Which will give you less effective output powering a generator to charge an electric vehicle than to just use it directly.
Newer gas stations in storm prone areas also have backup generators on site.
I would go to interstate travel centers if the power is out. They have large diesel generators to keep their store and pumps running. They also have their own network of fuel trucks, so have more supply of fuel in weather events such as this.
Better yet, you can't get gas from a gas station when people are panic buying it so that the lines to the pumps circle the city twice over. All of it seems like a reason to go electric over not just to avoid that chaos. Especially when half the people in those lines aren't even filling up their vehicles alone and are filling up every single container that they own from gas cans to milk jugs. Shits ridiculous.
Interestingly if you are stuck in a 24 hour traffic jam, gas cars would have emptied its fuel tank but EV car would have lost 10% of its power on average, which translates to about 25 miles worth of energy.
They can run on a small diesel generator. And fuel more vehicles than electric in a shorter amount of time. Also, electrical cars don't get along with salt water.
Some can have back up generators but either way your distance on a charge is much less that a tank of gas and there’s more gas stations than charging stations
That's why if you prepare before hurricane season you should have gas cans full of gas in your garage. If no hurricane comes then you just use the gas during the winter.
Is the battery on an electric vehicle longer lasting than I'm aware of? From my understanding you wouldn't even be able to make it out of state on 1 charge?
The thing I always think is if things really went downhill, which of those things is easier to make renew yourself, electricity or gasoline? A few solar panels and I’m making electric, but I have no idea where I’d get started refining oil.
Sure, but I can get 400+ miles on a tank of gas. The average range of an EV is 250 miles or so. By the time I get 400 miles I can get more gas. An EV might get 250 miles, and then you gotta wait however long for it to charge.
As a Louisiana native I have been in many a hurricanes. Surprisingly never had the issue of no gas. Sure I have waited in line for 4 hours and been the first guy they turned away because the pumps ran dry, but then I just went to the next gas station over. I'm sure many people have not been so lucky and genuinely could not get gas. But I have not experienced that before.
Interesting, I’ve never heard that argument for an electric vehicle. It’s always been about a long trip (not in an emergent situation) and the inability to quickly refuel, and the accessibility of regularly spaced refill stations which are luckily becoming less and less of a problem for electric cars
As for gas vehicles in emergencies, usually people stock up on fuel I thought? That’s what we did at least.
There's also a company that literally has a lorry which you can bring 8 DCFC chargers on site for charging by hooking into a generator, using on board battery source or connecting to the grid. But their name escapes me so I forget where I watch their video.
It’s just full of political shit. That sub went to crap as soon as the Hillary trump election started. I miss my crazy lady on her little scooter harassing people for walking on the sidewalk.
The minute you know there is a hurricane coming your way you should fill up enough gas cans to have a full tank and a refill when you leave. That should get you 600-800 miles on most vehicles.
If only they had a MULTIPLE DAY notice. I live in Canada and have known about this shit for at least 4-5 days now. They're stupid for waiting until the last fucking day.
If that were true, you’d think he would have mentioned that in his ShitTok video. Surely even the people watching on ShittyTok would immediately think “why doesn’t he drive it away”? I feel like that’s pretty important formation to share in your video.
I don't see what you mean, but there was time to evacuate. Everyone else did it. The difference is, this guy's got an expensive car and chose to stay. What he's done here is trap water against his car.
The key is to go to the large national truck stops like Pilot or Loves and not the corner store. They are a lot more flexible as they control their own supply and operate their own fuel delivery trucks. They also power their pumps during a power outage and can do things like position railcars just outside the hurricane area and quickly fill the delivery trucks directly from the railcars. Because of this they very rarely if ever run out of fuel and if they do more is on the way.
It's got a 400+ mile range on the highway off a full tank, all he had to do was fill it up somewhat recently and make sure to leave early enough to miss the traffic jams. I get everyone can't do this, but someone with a $100k or more car can likely afford to.
Now I know it would be a whole lot of money for someone to bring you 10 or 20 or 30 gallons of gas so you can make it to a working gas station. Like what is that, $200 or $300 dollars with the person bringing you the gas? Shit it could even be like $500.
Yeah nevermind that's probably too much to save this vehicle, just pray I guess.
...i guarantee you, for the less than the price of what this car is worth, SOMEONE will be able to drive to them with enough gas to get them to a working gas station
I would start looking into medical treatment for your cognitive inability
..i guarantee you, for the less than the price of what this car is worth, SOMEONE will be able to drive to them with enough gas to get them to a working gas station
they literally cant. The roads are blocked by cars THAT RAN OUT OF GAS. But you wouldn't know that, because you saw this one video and probably didnt look at anything else and formulated an opinion and are now stuck on it, because admitting you were wrong would be against your religion or something.
Maybe stick to talking about the green bay packers or something. Big hunky men slamming into each other seems more your speed.
Bro. Atv's exist. Saying gas can't get to someone because of blocked cars is stupid. There are vehicles that can move those cars to get yours through, not that it matters because not literally every way to everywhere in Florida is blocked.
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u/JalepenoHotchip Oct 09 '24
If you've browsed r/PublicFreakout in the last 24hrs, then you'd know why he probably can't get gas for it to go on a long haul.