Prius power!

We lose our electricity only rarely. And even when we do, it's unusual for the outage to last very long. So what! I'm going to find an inverter and figure out how to use it:

After a storm knocked out power in his neighborhood, John Sweeney did some characteristic things to keep warm in the chilly Massachusetts winter weather. His family bundled up, they burned wood, but for lack of an emergency generator to keep the lights on they took advantage of the battery based design of their Prius. The Harvard Press reports:

Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan, and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas.

“When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius…These inverters are available for about $100 many places online,” he wrote.

The device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.

Lifehacker