Volt as Emergency Power Generator

[Chevrolet Customer Svc]

We have gotten a few calls recently regarding using the vehcile as a back-up generator. I just wanted to clear a few things up and recommend that you do not use the Volt as a one.There are no provisions to connect the vehicle to the home with electrical output and there are no provisions on the vehicle to convert from 360+ DC voltage back to either 240 or 120 volt AC. The vehicle was not intended to generate electricity for home use.

[Slapshot28]

We have gotten a few calls recently regarding using the vehcile as a back-up generator. I just wanted to clear a few things up and recommend that you do not use the Volt as a one.There are no provisions to connect the vehicle to the home with electrical output and there are no provisions on the vehicle to convert from 360+ DC voltage back to either 240 or 120 volt AC. The vehicle was not intended to generate electricity for home use.

Whoops, I made a poor wording choice for the topic of this thread. Sorry about that. It was unintentional.

[Jmattioli]

Here is what i found from poking around in my 2012 Volt. The fuses off the positive battery terminals are 150A, 80A, 80A, 80A, 80A with the last 80A presently unused. See pictures on link below. With the Volt off the battery voltage was about 12.79v, with the Volt on the voltage was about 14.7 but went down to about 14.2 after awhile of charging. There appears little room to install an inverter unless you do some mods (making holes) to your side enclosures and bring the wires up to a connector to attach an inverter when you want to use it. You could possibly just put your own 150 fuse in line with the positive terminal of the battery and use a 1000w inverter to set in the back cargo area with a heaving duty disconnect as someone else pointed out that was used for a winch (app 25-35 dollars) One should not the battery is a 60A hour battery but that shouldn't matter since it can be charged by the HV battery through over a 200+A fuse as long as the Volt is on. I can't read the number on the fuse in the picture and i don't know what the voltage may be at the battery post when drawing up to 150A. I suspect it will be OK but haven't measured yet.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx...A0ACA16499!152

[ClarksonCote]

Here is what i found from poking around in my 2012 Volt. The fuses off the positive battery terminals are 150A, 80A, 80A, 80A, 80A with the last 80A presently unused. See pictures on link below. With the Volt off the battery voltage was about 12.79v, with the Volt on the voltage was about 14.7 but went down to about 14.2 after awhile of charging. There appears little room to install an inverter unless you do some mods (making holes) to your side enclosures and bring the wires up to a connector to attach an inverter when you want to use it. You could possibly just put your own 150 fuse in line with the positive terminal of the battery and use a 1000w inverter to set in the back cargo area with a heaving duty disconnect as someone else pointed out that was used for a winch (app 25-35 dollars) One should not the battery is a 60A hour battery but that shouldn't matter since it can be charged by the HV battery through over a 200+A fuse as long as the Volt is on. I can't read the number on the fuse in the picture and i don't know what the voltage may be at the battery post when drawing up to 150A. I suspect it will be OK but haven't measured yet.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx...A0ACA16499!152

I hooked my inverter up to the main (200+A) fuse for the DC-DC charging system (the name escapes me at the moment)... I ran the wires underneath the hatch compartment over to the fuse box door on the left, and left them coiled in there. If/When I need to use the inverter, I just pop open this fuse box, grab the wires, and hook up to the inverter.

It's not ideal (I would have preferred to use the spare 80A fuse) but my gauge wire was too large for that location, and my 1000W inverter would require a 100A fuse at least.

[Rusty]

I hooked my inverter up to the main (200+A) fuse for the DC-DC charging system (the name escapes me at the moment)...

It's the APM. Out of curiosity, on which side of the fuse did you connect the wires (on the APM side, or the battery side)?

That fuse isn't there to protect the battery from too much draw by the APM, it's there to protect the APM from too much draw by the car. If you hooked up on the APM side, you've completely bypassed all the fusing in the car (practically speaking), and you've put the APM at rather some risk.

Of course, if you've hooked up on the battery side the same is true of the battery. It's now unprotected. Basically, I think my point is that's a really bad place to try and connect into the aux power system.

The 80 amp fuse will feed a 1000 watt load at capacity if the rail is at 12.5V, which is within reason. And the fuse is a slow blow, so you can probably draw significantly more than 80 amps if you don't do it for very long (think "motor start"). You might really want to reconsider how you have your inverter hooked up...

[larry4pyro]

We have gotten a few calls recently regarding using the vehcile as a back-up generator. I just wanted to clear a few things up and recommend that you do not use the Volt as a one.There are no provisions to connect the vehicle to the home with electrical output and there are no provisions on the vehicle to convert from 360+ DC voltage back to either 240 or 120 volt AC. The vehicle was not intended to generate electricity for home use.

Message understood. But the need still exists. Offer an emergency power option for the Volt and people will buy it.

[Jmattioli]

Clarkson,

If it were me I would hook directly to the post and put my own inline fuse of 150A between the pos terminal to the inverter which should be safe since you are then protected from shorting the battery and the dc to dc converter by both fuses.
Joe

[ClarksonCote]

Clarkson,

If it were me I would hook directly to the post and put my own inline fuse of 150A between the pos terminal to the inverter which should be safe since you are then protected from shorting the battery and the dc to dc converter by both fuses.
Joe

I agree, good idea!. I think I'd like to do that longer term, I just didn't have the inline fuse at the time I took everything apart to do the installation. The unused fuse was previously documented as being 100A, but I then discovered it was only 80A. I think I'll plan on an inline fuse at some point in the not-so-distant future.

[Noel Park]

Message understood. But the need still exists. Offer an emergency power option for the Volt and people will buy it.

True that! Bring it on!

[DCFusor]

I've just done this. I got a cheapo MSW inverter and put it under the hatch with the battery, made a hole in the plastic to reach the switch, and ran a cord out through a hole in the left side panel. I used short #6 wires directly to the battery (inverter has its own internal fusing). Basically, this works a charm but for one thing - my APM seems to like to float this battery right at 15v (14.95) - and the inverter will sometimes shut down in self defense due to overvoltage! In fact, it seems they designed some negative resistance into the charger system so the more the load, the more the battery volts go up (no this is not impossible, and it's also used in DC motor controls)! So it appears I need to use longer or skinnier wire to the inverter. I'll post some pix the next time I take the 4 nuts off to get in there so you can see how I did it. The inverter is long and flat and fits nicely in front of the battery in there. No matter what kind of inverter you have, nearly all have an overvoltage shutdown and this is something to have to deal with.

I've not managed to have the Volt start the IC engine in this mode yet all by itself, but I was able to get it to start with a big inverter loading by putting it in gear and hitting the throttle. It then stayed running a couple minutes and shut down, with about an 800w load on the inverter. Night and cold made me stop the tests today, but I'll learn more tomorrow. I might have to make less ideal cables to keep that thing from shutting itself off, or get inside it and find and disable the overvolt detect (ugh, I'm an EE, but that's real painful work).

I've run off inverters since about '79. MSW inverters run motors just fine, thanks, in fact in many cases better than pure sine. In fact, in my all solar facility, I have the big motors for the air compressor, lathe, and mill running off an old Trace 3524, with the rest of the house running off a SW4024 as the optimal combo. The motors are a little bit noisier, get a little bit warmer (but only a little) but start faster and have more torque than when run off pure sine. For a motor that runs "forever" like a fridge, this might be a problem (most are so under-designed they're on the verge of frying normally anyway), but it's not with big machines that you turn off once in awhile. You will often get an annoying buzz since there are a lot of high frequency harmonics in that square wave.