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I hope the ability to use your EV battery to backup your house power becomes an expected capability in the future. Glad Ford included it. Too bad Tesla backed away from it, i’m guessing due to their powerwall business.


I'm interested to see if this leads to people living in places without power and using their truck as the sole source of electricity.

If you have a small cabin with no a/c, wood heat, and a propane stove - your house is going to use hardly any power compared to your truck. It would barely make a difference.


I just can't see this use case.

The power draw is probably fine, but the contention for the battery would be a problem. Think, "hey honey, can we put off the Costco trip until next week so we can leave the internet up, and lights on?"

Implementing a transfer switch and dummy load just to dump solar generation when your truck is being a truck would feel like a weird exercise.


But how would you charge the truck?


At a charging station? A lot of people do a lot of their charging not at home already - at least in cities. Presumably this could / will be true in rural areas, too.


This is the opposite of what is usually said about EVs - that most people will charge them at home, overnight.


That will probably not happen.

The mentality is extremely different, you do at home what you can, to the maximum.


I'm interested in towing a small camper and using the truck battery for lights on the camper. That would upen up more camp site flexibility.


I want to know if it is 240V split phase. A lot of houses use multiwire branch circuits so getting split phase power would be a Big Deal. If Ford puts a big gnarly inverter capable of this in the F150, then I'm going to be stoked.

But I need an HD truck, and it has to have enough range to tow, which means I'm not in the market for a Lightning. Dammit.


i wonder how long a car could possibly power a house


Depends if you need heating/cooling. Otherwise 500W would cover lights, fridge, TV. So 100kW battery, 200 hours.


Depends on the size of the house's load and the size of the battery and the efficiency of the inverter.

Ford's promo site says 'up to 10 days with rationing power' asuming 30kWh use per day with extended-range battery. But it's not clear to me if 30kWH is normal use, and rationing would be less, or if that's the rationed use. A 300 kWH battery seems rather large to me, and i haven't seen an actual spec for the Ford.

Edit: reread their site after reading sibling posts, in a different blurb they say 3 days or 10 days with rationing with the same assumption about 30 kWH per day; so their rationing assumption must be getting down closer to 9 kWH per day. Either way, a nice feature to have that would eliminate a portable generator for me.


The average household electricity consumption per day is 28.9 kWh. For comparison, the Tesla Model X long range has a battery capacity of 100 kWh.

So in theory, a fully charged Model X could power the average home for 3 days. Really puts into perspective how much energy is needed to move a car at highway speeds.


Ford claims three days based on 30 kwh per day usage.


So the standard "house battery backup" systems are around the 20-30kWH range, and they are good for about 1-2 days depending on your usage.

The F150 Lighting has up to a 150kWH battery, so somewhere in the 1-2 week range, depending on use.


From other reports I've seen claims of three days at "normal" power draw, up to ten days if you're deliberately conserving power.




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