DarkStar said:
ebill3 said:
Please, how did you do that - power the freezer and fridge wih the LEAF?
Probably just used an inverter hooked up to the DC to DC Converter.
That's basically what I did. It would be best to put the inverter under the hood and connect it up directly, and I will do that if I can find a place to put it, but I used an approach which was expedient for the day, even if it did have its limitations.
I powered the fridge and freezer from two inverters that were powered from a deep-cycle battery that I had around. This deep-cycle battery was powered by the LEAF in the "On" state through jumper cables. The problem with this approach was that both their refrigerator and their freezer were quite old and were both hard to start and used a lot of power when running.
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures:
Here is a picture of the LEAF with the jumper cables attached. Note that I did NOT connect to the negative terminal to the battery, but rather to the grounding point on top of the DC/DC converter per instructions from Phil.
This is the deep-cycle battery with the two inverters attached, the 500-W unit powering the freezer and the 1000-W unit powering the refrigerator. (I have a 2-kW pure-sine inverter around here, but it requires a bit more wiring to use safely, not that this was overly safe!)
The main issue with this approach is that the LEAF regulates at about 13V and that means that you can only deliver current to the remote battery equal to (13V-VRemoteBat)/Rcables. The result is that if the refrigerators draw enough power and they do not ever cycle off, then you will drain the remote battery, which happened in the case of our neighbors.
We had another, shorter-duration outage a couple of days later and I was able to easily start and run our refrigerator using the 500-W inverter and both our deep freeze and refrigerator in our garage using the 1000-W unit. Our units are all much newer than our neighbors'. It was quite nice, since there was no need to use gasoline, drag out the generator, go outside or even open up the garage to keep the food cold. That's handy when it is windy and rainy outside!
Of course, you need to be careful when doing this, because if you damage your LEAF it is not covered under warranty. Here is the wording found on page 9 in the warranty booklet :
2011 LEAF Warranty Information Booklet said:
WHAT IS NOT COVERED
GENERAL EXCLUSIONS
This warranty does not cover damage, failure, or corrosion resulting from, or caused by:
- Failure to operate the vehicle in accordance with the OWNER'S MANUAL.
- Misuse, such as overloading, using the vehicle to tow, driving over curbs, or using the vehicle as a power source.
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