-11:23 a.m. Pacific Time on February 23, 2021

If you try to use an electric car battery pack to power your home, Tesla will invalidate your warranty-more and more people have been studying this issue after power outages in some parts of the United States.

Although Tesla vehicles are not equipped with a two-way charging function, which can realize the function of vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home, there is actually a way to use Tesla vehicles to power certain devices.

Just plug the 2,000 watt inverter into the car’s 12 volt battery.

Update: As Tesla Hack Green pointed out, it is best to connect to the 12-volt system through the penthouse under the back seat.

With a low-voltage architecture, you can get power from the main battery pack and power multiple devices on the inverter.

After severe weather in certain areas of the United States caused power outages, Tesla owners have been paying attention to this issue recently.

Tesla owner Bob Schatz described his own settings in a post on the Tesla Owners Club Portland Facebook group (via Green on Twitter):

"So, if you lose power due to a storm, you can use your car to power some of the equipment in your home. Here, I use a 2,000 watt inverter from Harbour Freight, which costs $170. To connect to the battery, the shorter the wire, the better. Then my gas stove has an extension cord to power the blower and stove computer. This alone consumes about 1,100 watts. Then I still have enough refrigerators and a few lights."

This setting on Tesla cars can provide hours of electricity, but Schatz found that Tesla did not like it.

Over the next few days, even though the store said the battery seemed to be strong, the vehicle began to send alerts that the 12-volt battery needed to be replaced.

The Tesla Service Center said that the battery needs to be replaced, but they actually found this post in a Facebook group and said that his settings invalidated the warranty.

Tesla hacker Green found the relevant part of the Tesla warranty:

Tesla’s warranty statement that you cannot use the vehicle as a “fixed power source”.

The moral of the story is: if you plan to do this, don't post it on social media, because Tesla will find it.

Although I had questions about Tesla’s warranty before, I understand them in this case because the vehicle was not made for this.

However, this is a shame.

Today, we see many automakers have built-in bidirectional chargers in electric vehicles to directly access the main battery pack.

Just today, we reported the release of the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 equipped with this technology.

Tesla has been reluctant to integrate this capability into its vehicles in the past, but Tesla’s chief technology officer Drew Baglino recently stated that the automaker plans to implement this capability in future vehicles. ability.

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Tesla is a transportation and energy company. It sells cars in the "Tesla Motors" division and stationary battery packs for household, commercial and utility scale projects in the "Tesla Energy" division.

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