3 week old R1S saves the day in North Carolina hurricane disaster.

[Leeda]

I purchased my R1S 3 weeks ago and left it in my garage with 80% charge. When the hurricane came up through Florida and then hit us in North Carolina we lost the ability to travel and electric. We were able to move the refrigerator in the garage close to the Rivian and in ran fine from the 110v outlet. We are also able to charge small battery power supplies. It has been a life saver.

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[Electrified Outdoors]

Glad you’re safe. Some of the stories we have been seeing from the area are absolutely heartbreaking.

love seeing the Rivian powering things in an outage. It can run a Kuerig as well. Have to stay caffeinated ?

 

[schlosrat]

That's a clever way to keep things running after a storm! I hope you sustained only very minor impact and they have your power back on soon.

 

[Donald Stanfield]

I hope you're not out by the Asheville area; from what I've seen, they were devastated. If you are I hope they can get you up and running as fast as possible.

 

[KBabione]

You won't believe me until you try it, but you can run your extension cord out the bottom of your R1S tailgate and keep everything closed...Here's the link: Extension Cord Hack

 

[Mellowyellow]

+1 extension hack out the back. Worked great on a recent camping trip. Good luck getting power back!

 

[BigSkies]

Wishing you the best on getting back to normal, and I’m glad the Rivian was a help.

As a recommendation for anyone thinking about using a Rivian for backup in the future, I recommend buying a heavy duty extension cord that can go from your garage to the important areas of your house. You want something that can handle at least 12A constant load if you’ll be powering something like a space heater.

These are not cheap extension cords. The one I bought was around $80 IIRC at Harbor Freight.

 

[R1Sky Business]

I purchased my R1S 3 weeks ago and left it in my garage with 80% charge. When the hurricane came up through Florida and then hit us in North Carolina we lost the ability to travel and electric. We were able to move the refrigerator in the garage close to the Rivian and in ran fine from the 110v outlet. We are also able to charge small battery power supplies. It has been a life saver.

Keep the world adventurous

 

[Nixapatfan]

You won't believe me until you try it, but you can run your extension cord out the bottom of your R1S tailgate and keep everything closed...Here's the link: Extension Cord Hack

Mixed feelings with this one, it's nice that you can run a thick cord trough that but at the same time kind of embarrassing for build tolerances for modern cars

 

[Polar]

Mixed feelings with this one, it's nice that you can run a thick cord trough that but at the same time kind of embarrassing for build tolerances for modern cars

That all the weather striping - and out the rear there is no metal/metal interface at the tailgate so zero to do with tolerance.

 

[docwhiz]

Upping the power to 5 or 10 kW 240v ac would be sufficient for most home emergency power outages.
It would also make it easier to connect. Just a simple "generator transfer switch" to permit 240 v ac input to the house would work.
Ford Pro power is a good example.

 

[SadHill]

Did the same thing over the summer when we lost power for 3 days. Powered my fridge, freezer, wifi/modem and some lights and barely used any power (like 25% if I can remember).

 

[iansriv]

Glad you & family are safe. I wonder what people consider when deciding to shelter in place. I'm not sure what I would do-take off for safer grounds or stay. It's a tough choice.

 

[Rizzian]

In theory, a full freezer should keep contents frozen for up tp 48 hours. The problem is that you never know how long it will take for power to be restored. We lost power shortly before midnight on the Friday that Helene made landfall. When we didn't hear anything from our relatively small electric service provider (Beaches Energy), I ran an extension cord from the R1S. I put it in camp mode, screens dark w/outlets on. I had charged my Rvian to 100% in anticipation of the storm.

I wasn't expecting the power to be out for very long, so my only real concern was to keep food from going bad. We have (2) fridges with freezers (one in the kitchen and one in the garage) and one medium-sized tub freezer in the garage. Starting about 2 hours after losing power, I plugged in the kitchen fridge and let it run for 45 minutes. Then every 45 minutes I would switch the extension cord to another one of the three fridge/freezers and just let them cycle like that for the rest of the night (I didn't want to overload the Rivian outlet with all three at once). Power was restored around 7:15AM the next morning and I was impressed that the R1S was still showing 98% power after running refrigerators for over 5 hours.

It wasn't much of a stress test, but I'm looking forward to Gen2 chargers with bidirectional capability. Gaining higher voltage/output access to my Rivian's 135kwh battery pack for home power backup would mean having the equivalent storage of more than NINE Tesla 3rd-generation PowerWalls parked in my garage at full charge. I should be able to run my house off of the Rivian for 3-7 days (depending mainly on how much we need to run our home AC units). Considering that nine PowerWalls would cost somewhere around $137k BEFORE installation, it makes the R1S a bargain at any trim level.

Of course, under more extreme circumstances (and assuming you don't have other cars available) you would need to factor in how much power to keep in reserve so that you could still drive to safety (or to a charger). It would suck to wake up on day 3, still not knowing if/when power will be restored and having to bug out with only 40 miles of range left.

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