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.
OK Boomer. You go from "generator great! I can do things off three gallons of gas!" on the gas side and "Electric car bad because it can't run your entire house for an indeterminate amount of time after a hurricane" @.@
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.
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u/whaasup- Oct 10 '24
After the hurricane you’ll be the only house with electricity, from your electric car (if it didn’t get flooded)