Main pic: Gerry Grennan kept the essentials in his home going by plugging them into his Kia Nero EV. Image: RTÉ News.
While many Donegal householders used generators to power their homes during outages caused by Storm Éowyn, one EV owner found a new use for his vehicle.
Gerry Grennan kept the essentials in his home overlooking Lough Swilly powered up by plugging them into his Kia EV6 following the gales that battered the county at the end of January.
Like many electric vehicles, it has a power to load (P2L) capability, which means it can also act as a power source.
An adaptor, supplied with the car, turns the charging port into a three pin socket.
Mr Grennan told RTÉ News he simply ran an extension lead from the car in through a window.
“The first thing we did was we tried the kettle and that worked, and so we made a cup of tea,” he explained.
“Okay, what do we do next? The freezer was the next thing on the agenda. So we started slowly plugging things in, and over the course of the day, we managed to save our food in the freezer, we had a bit of dinner with the air fryer, things like that. So it’s some form of normality, if you like.”
After three days, the car battery was down to 20% and Mr Grennan drove 15 minutes into Letterkenny to a public charging point.
A couple of hours later, it was back up to 90% and reconnected to the appliances at home.
That kept things going until the mains power came back two days later.
Mr Grennan said that when you include the cost of topping up the battery at the public charger, the electricity from his car over the five days came to a little over €50.
Not all EVs can act as a power source with information on the different makes and models available on the manufacturers’ websites.
For full report, see www.rte.ie
Tags:
