How to Run Your House on Your Car

ere’s a scenario: An electric storm knocks out power to your house just as the Super Bowl is starting. Do you knock on the neighbor’s door with a six-pack, a bag of pretzels and a contrite expression on your face, or do you try something much more innovative—plugging your television into your Nissan Leaf’s 24-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

Believe it or not, that’s not science fiction. In Japan, consistent power has been a huge problem since the earthquake and tsunami, and Nissan is one of many companies suffering through blackouts and shifting to a Saturday-to-Wednesday work week. And it’s a reason Japanese customers will now have "Leaf to Home" as an option, with two days of available electricity.

Chris Swinney, a Florida-based anesthesiologist, told me then that he’d connected his hybrid into the backup uninterruptible power supply at his house during a power outage, and soon had the refrigerator producing cold air and the lights blazing. “It was running everything in the house except the central air-conditioning,” he said.

The Prius’ nickel-metal-hydride battery pack is only 1.3 kilowatt-hours, a fraction of the Leaf’s, but it can still be very useful in blackouts. On its own it would run out of power in an hour, but with the gas engine cycling on and off it will act like a generator, provide up to three kilowatts, and keep the lights on as long as there’s fuel in the tank—days, or even a week if you don’t plug in too much. The UPS unit’s inverter turns the DC from the batteries into AC for the house.

The Leaf has plenty of power, but no generator to keep its pack charged up. Add a portable V2H charging inverter, and you could actually use your Prius to recharge your stranded Leaf.