Henry, this may or may not belong here but I have a question for an engineer.

I am getting a Prius and the battery bank is around 300v DC NiMH1.1KWh and electroncally designed to stay at 90% DOD or better

(I would eventually like to juice them up to 10KWh Li Ion batteries)

If I dropped a string inverter in the back of the car and tapped off the 300vDC for islanded AC (car based emergency generator) is this potentially feasible?

Does anyone make an islanding inverter that would take abt 300vDC?

thanks, robert

There are no string (High Voltage) offgrid inverters that I know about. Also that Prius is a very small battery, my walmart deep-cycle are 12V*105ah or about 1.2kw or 1kw 80% DOD. You would kill the battery pack in no time

If you really want to do this, you'll need a DC/DC 300V to 48V converter, then your inverter for AC

you definitely don't want to tap those batteries for power. they really don't receive much current in the first place as they get a small amount either from braking or the gas engine when needed. these batteries are essentially a bunch of size D nimh batteries in series at around 4amphrs so the current flowing to them for charging is very low. if anything it would be better to have a small pv inverted up to the battery charge voltage to supplement with some solar, taking or keeping the gas engine offline longer during highway travelling. i talked this out once on naws with somebody who had a prius and was trying to add solar to them for that very purpose. i don't know if he ever found a way to do it as there were 2 major obstacles to doing it. 1 was inverting upward to the voltage needed as these don't exist commercially that we were aware of. 2 was that the charger isn't easilly accessed and we weren't able to figure out how they were regulating it and where it could be tapped with the inverters voltage. there could be a third as you may not only violate your warantee, but you could ruin something very expensive in there. price that battery bank alone and see what i mean.