Prius, UPS, Priups

[jenk]

From The New York Times:

By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: September 20, 2006

KINNELON, N.J.

It isn’t likely that many suburban homeowners will follow Richard Factor’s example and decide that if the power goes out they can always run the lights, computer and refrigerator from the Toyota Prius in their garage.

Still, in the annals of suburban ingenuity, there should at least be a few pages in the bit of electrical history that has played out in Mr. Factor’s rambling modern house at the top of a verdant hill in northern New Jersey.

Mr. Factor, a 60-year-old technology executive who has the frizzy, excitable look of a benign mad scientist, takes his achievement seriously enough that anyone happening to look at his blog on May 5 would have found the following:

“The good news: Power Failure! Whoopie!”

“The bad news: It only lasted for an hour.”

Sadly, the blackout that day was so short that the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) battery that is part of his system kept the power going before any four-wheeled power source was needed. But even though he’s still awaiting a definitive test of how well this works in a crisis, for techies of the world, for frustrated homeowners, for greens in love with their Prius, Mr. Factor has taken one small step for man, if not necessarily a giant leap for mankind.

Mr. Factor’s journey began even before he got his hybrid gas-electric Prius in January 2005. In his work life, Mr. Factor is founder and chairman of Eventide Inc., which develops and manufactures digital audio processing products (including the one used to bleep out obscenities) as well as avionics instrumentation and communication recorders for public safety institutions.

As someone who thought of himself as both techie and green, he bought a Prius for its energy-saving, reduced noxious emissions and the other things that have made the car a cult success.

But then he started thinking about something else. “I have decided that we are all looking at hybrids in an upside-down fashion,’’ he wrote on a Web site (priups.com) where he started to track his experiment. “This site is dedicated to that ‘other side’ of the hybrid. Don’t think of it as ‘a car,’ think of it as a power plant.”

So, he thought, here he had this car that spends most of its life “lump-like, sitting in a garage or a parking spot.” Meanwhile, it had a powerful battery, about 17 times the voltage of a conventional car battery, just sitting dormant. What if that power could be used for other purposes, like powering a house in an emergency or potentially working (he hoped, with tens of thousands or millions of others) to augment the power grid in a time of crisis — like in a hurricane or a terrorist attack?

Thus began an odyssey far too complicated for those of us whose electrical knowledge begins and ends at screwing in a light bulb. (The Web site explains it in mind-numbing detail.) But in essence, he found a way to run heavy-gauge cable to the car battery and connect it to a backup circuit box inside the house through a UPS unit that changes the DC power in the car to the AC power in the house. It then hooks up to a circuit box that includes essentials like refrigerator and lights and leaves out things like the air-conditioner or pump for the swimming pool. (A bare-bones version, an alternative to a cheap home generator, would involve running extension cords to a UPS unit in the car.)

And voilà! On a warm September morning it seemed a snap to make the connection, plug it in, turn on the car and switch from utility company power to Prius power.

THERE are, as you can imagine, a few caveats. No one in his right mind who’s not a complete tech geek would even consider trying it. (Nor should they. Power from the car battery can be as dangerous as electricity from a light socket.) It only works with a hybrid car, so if you don’t have one, never mind. And you can do the same thing either with an expensive generating system hooked to a backup circuit panel or with a cheap generator connected with extension cords, so why do it?

Why, indeed? Mr. Factor’s grand dream is an army of hybrids, at once cutting down on energy use and always available as ready reinforcements for the power grid. And if there were hundreds of thousands or millions of hybrids out there, someone could come up with a commercial version of this. So, the average idiot could hire an electrician to do it.

That day might be a tad far off, but whether or not it arrives, Mr. Factor can still take pride in his handiwork.

“It was fun, but everything is fun for me,’’ he said. “I’m easily entertained.”

More info at http://priups.com/