Lightning is keeping our lights on after storm!

We had a huge windstorm come through yesterday and lost power all over the city, including my house. My neighbors tree fell and took out a pole, so it’s probably going to be a while.



Thankfully I was ready and had the cord layed out to switch to pro power on board. First time I did, it failed saying it needed service. I disconnected the 12v battery for a minute and then it worked like a champ!




Here is when I first turned it on at 9:30 last night:



And this is from this morning:



Not too bad, 37 miles of range for about 12 hours of use.

Nice exterior garage! Im jealous

I tried that as well yesterday with the 240 plug to my generator inlet but learned like most of you already know, I ran into the ground fault popping in the truck. Thankfully power is back now but I’ll be calling my electrician this week to get a GFI transfer switch installed so it will work next time.

I was able to use 120 to power our fridge though, so that was nice and it was my first real time trying pro power onboard.

So, we are now on day 4 of no electricity and the truck has been great. I have been able to keep 2 refrigerators and one freezer running, internet/cameras, as well a handful of lights on the whole time. Heck, I have even been able to run our electric water heater multiple times for hot showers.

Weather has been great, so that really helped, but a cold front is coming and I'm just hoping we get restored sometime tomorrow to get the heat pump going again. If not, I'll have to try and figure out how to run that off my old Duromax generator.

Walle1jm said:

I tried that as well yesterday with the 240 plug to my generator inlet but learned like most of you already know, I ran into the ground fault popping in the truck. Thankfully power is back now but I’ll be calling my electrician this week to get a GFI transfer switch installed so it will work next time.

I was able to use 120 to power our fridge though, so that was nice and it was my first real time trying pro power onboard.

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Try at your own risk... but I believe based on other peoples comments on this topic. If you are running your inlet to an Interlock switch from your 30amp bed outlet that you can remove the grounding pin from your adapter cable so the truck doesnt get the redundant Ground fault error. I believe the conclusion from someone on this forums electrician was this may be permissible as the truck has GFCI protection and the House would still have ground protection.

***Try at your own risk***

luebri said:

Try at your own risk... but I believe based on other peoples comments on this topic. If you are running your inlet to an Interlock switch from your 30amp bed outlet that you can remove the grounding pin from your adapter cable so the truck doesnt get the redundant Ground fault error. I believe the conclusion from someone on this forums electrician was this may be permissible as the truck has GFCI protection and the House would still have ground protection.

***Try at your own risk***

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Yeah, I actually called a few electricians the other day to ask them that same question and I think it would work also but I didn’t want to risk it. I’m going to have them put in a GFI switch (I think that’s what it’s called).

And with that, the power is back on and Luna is drinking from the grid again. She did a great job helping us through the outage and she deserves a nite off!

Total time off was 1hr shy of a full 5 days and I had to charge twice at EA to make it through.

So power is out again after a storm came through. Luna was fully charged to 100% today so I’ve got lots of power to get me through a few days, but hopefully the power gets fixed quickly!

Maquis said:

There is a possibility of shock hazard doing it this way. During a ground fault (appliance shorts hot wire to ground, for example), there will be a brief instant where the sheet metal of the truck has a measurable voltage to the house‘s grounding system. So if a person is touching the truck and a metal water pipe when the fault occurs, they could get shocked.

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That's not how it works. The ground serves as a redundant neutral for breaker pop, and a path for lightning. The 'best' bypass for this outside of code is to 1) Label a cord as "floating ground" or "Not Grounded", 2) disconnect the ground wire from the cord itself as close to the structure's incoming feed (easiest with self-made cords). Due to bonding in the main panel, the neutral and ground are the same electrical path so a short to ground or neutral is seen as the same. Everything in the panel will work as it should including GFI / AFI circuits.

My truck's pronouns are "Utility" / "The Utility" and as such is code compliant
I've gone round and round politely with MEs and EEs, but none have been able to point to anything outside of 'but code' and a 'break' in the neutral, which will trip the breaker. Then it shifts to 'but what if someone isn't using a GFI generator, which is beyond the scope of the discussion. Even then they'll still have a single point bond with the cord, or double otherwise.

Too many people fail to understand the point of an earthed ground, going so far as to provide the truck with its own earthed ground, despite it not actually doing anything.

Howard_Scott_Warshaw said:

I'm also wondering if the MENSA members at @Ford Motor Company were smart enough to isolate the sheet metal from the N-G bond of Pro Power.

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The truck's frame and everything connected to it are on the ground of the AC power output of the PPOB. You can check both the resistance of ground to frame and neutral to frame and you will find 0 ohms