The other day my wife ran into the store for a little while and I waited outside in the car. I had the windows up and the ignition turned on with the AC running. The AC ran for maybe 15 minutes or so on battery before the ICE turned on and charged the battery to three bars when it turned off. The ICE cycled on and off a couple of times as I waited for my wife to come out of the store. I was very comfortable in the car while waiting for her and it got me thinking a Prius might make a good surveillance vehicle. How long can you sit with the ignition turned on and the AC running? Is that bad for the car? Just wondering, it sure beat roasting in a hot car.
I think you've answered your own questions... It lasts about 15 minutes on a mostly charged battery. The Air Conditioner draws something like 3.5 kW (I think this is for a genII), and you have about 650 Wh available to use (of 1.31 kWh total), so you should get ~12 minutes. If you don't mind the ICE cycling on/off, you can go until you run out of gas (as qbee42 pointed out). As long as you don't intend to do this for very-long periods of time, it should have no discernible effect on the life of the hybrid system. BTW, while surfing the net, I found this document on the GenII electric air conditioner. It is some presentation from Toyota to the EPA. I'll post the link only because I've never seen it before. Note its a .pdf. http://www.epa.gov/cpd/Presentations/Matsunaga electric inverter.pdf
