Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages by londons_explore on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:41PM (#50328382)

Likewise, there are plenty of plug-in hybrid cars which ought to be great home emergency backup generators (ie. they have a 40+ kilowatt generator and 7+ kilowatt inverter), but very few have this functionality even if the hardware in most cases supports it and would simply require a firmware update.

I had good luck with telling claude to rewrite my laptop bios to enable various power modes which were theoretically possible but disabled by firmware, like powering a fullsize screen from the laptop battery over usbc.

Maybe I'll tell claude to rewrite the car firmware too...

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Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages by DenisM on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:12PM (#50329274)

Be sure to alert the fire department ahead of time.

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Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages by hedora on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:20AM (#50333398)

I know someone that did this with an old Prius. No software hacking required. Just leave the ignition on, and wire into the high-voltage system (not at the same time, of course!). The engine auto-starts when the battery gets too low.

The more interesting approach is to do it with a used EV. You can get a 100-133 kWh car used for $20-30K. The last time I checked, that was below the price of a house backup battery with a quarter the capacity.

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