Anyone know the actual amp charge to 12v battery?

You look in the New Car Features manual. Toyota Service Information and Where To Find It | PriusChat



But of course that 120 amp figure is a maximum. The converter puts out whatever current is being drawn, up to that amount. The base load of the car in READY can be around 40 amps if you don't have many accessories going, so in those conditions you could hang 80 amps or so of new stuff on and not worry much. On the other hand, they would have had no reason to oversize the converter substantially compared to the maximum expected load, so when you have a lot of the car's heavy-draw items turned on, you can assume there's not very much to spare.

The converter does produce an output signal called IDH, which effectively means "Uncle! please turn some loads off!" From the factory, that's only used by the HVAC controller, which will turn off the 700 watt supplemental heat elements if they are on. For some mods where new heavy loads will be added, it could be worthwhile to include a circuit to monitor that signal.

 

120 that's pretty good in the '80s I was putting 120 amp alternators on various and sundry imported Toyotas and they were around a hundred amp alternators back then I mean gosh dang 120 amps to run a few appliances I don't know what but you know a coffee maker only runs about 8 amps or something like that

 

... one built for 120 volts in your house.

At 12 volts, that's 80 amps right there.

 

Can you not make the 120 volt appliance work in the Prius pretty readily? I am not the electronics somebody that's for sure but I thought people were powering houses or something off these things temporarily with a few pieces of equipment?

 

Can you not make the 120 volt appliance work in the Prius pretty readily? I am not the electronics person by any means but I thought people were running small houses off of these batteries with minimal equipment?

 

Pretty readily if you have the right stuff: an inverter to take the car's 12 volts DC and produce 120 volts AC for the appliance.

The conversion for the current is by the same factor in the other direction, so if the 120 volt appliance draws 8 amps, the inverter will pull 80 amps from the 12 volt system to power it. (Bit more than 80, of course, because some gets lost in the inverter itself.) Either 120 ✕ 8 or 12 ✕ 80 will get you the same 960 watts.

Some of the people running small houses are using less-common inverters that can work from the car's 200 volt traction battery instead. I have one that can supply 3000 watts, and yet only draw 15 amps from the car, because it's drawing from the 200 volt system, not the 12 volt.

 

Yes that's what I was talking about driving the nonsense off of the 200 volt DC battery I mean for you know a quick cup of coffee and running a few things for I don't know a few minutes or whatever it is you got going on and then off you go I mean I can't see it personally I have a diesel generator sitting out here that can power the whole property kind of like a military generator It's made for pretty good duty and over 100° weather. But I have it sitting in the shade next to a tank and all that stuff and it's wired up to a transverse switch and all that business yep did it myself didn't want to pay the exorbitant fees for basically four wires.

 

Yeah those are all good questions I'm imagining you'd have the car on or something or put it on every so often so it could run and charge the mess up like it does when you're sitting in a parking lot running the air conditioner looking at those magenta bars and the engine comes on and then if your engine wasn't on or if your system wasn't on something would go to beeping when you got to a preset kind of low SOC all that's handled by electronics now I would hope .

 

Of course you have to shop for an inverter that has a suitable input voltage. If you take an inverter from the neighborhood store that's made for connection to a 12 volt system, and you hook its inputs up to 200 volts, it's not gonna be any kind of inverter after that.

Assuming you have found an inverter with an input voltage compatible with the high-voltage system of the car, most people will attach it to the car side of the system main relays, so it will only be on when the car is in READY.

The lead thread for people interested in that topic is this one:

Electric power from a hybrid, connecting inverter to the high-voltage system | PriusChat