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I live in upstate NY and have a His and Hers Toyota Prius. I drive the 2004 - license plate PEAK OIL. My wife, Debra, drives the 2005 Prius- license plate PLUZ IN. I am impatiently waiting to have the Hymotion L5 PHEV module installed in Boston in September 2008. My passion is renewable energy and working to continually reduce my carbon footprint. I organize my regions involvement in the Green Buildings Open House. I film, edit and post videos of other renewable energy home owners to help spread the word and provide educational resources online to those who want to find out from real people or are installing real solutions today.

I found out about this forum from the yahoo groups Prius forum when I posted a message asking to find other people who have installed or are waiting to install the Hymotion Prius upgrade.

Since I have a solar electric system at my house and my wife works for the local school district. I decided to install the L5 unit in her car. She is home at 3pm and her round trip commute is only 10 miles. The L5 is rated for 40 miles, so she should conceivably only use 25% of the battery capacity, or 1.25KwH. I hope to be able to renewably charge the L5 from 3PM on every work day and am also hoping that the commute can be totally electric, therefore powered completely from renewable energy generated on my roof.

I am hoping folks can help me with ways to effectively monitor the status and performance of the Prius. I am relatively technical (I work in IT) but do not have electrical engineering experience.

I look forward to participating in this forum.

Christian

Welcome, Christian!! Based on what I've seen from early testing by Jay (TheForce) you are in for a real treat!!

Do you have an EV switch installed? It sounds as though this is crucial to ensuring you actually run just EV (because the engine will cool off too much in extended glides/EV sessions). He's hitting over 200mpg on his trips now!! :eek:

Welcome to the club.

Welcome to cleanmpg, I'm also from upstate NY (schenctady to be exact), however I don't own a hybrid. Like Sean said however, there is some really good info to be had for you good luck!

sean, you should put him in touch with mike floerchinger. he and linda have totally taken their house off the grid and run with sun power......

I'll ask him again but my understanding is that his house is still on the grid because the panel isn't large enough...

I'll ask him again but my understanding is that his house is still on the grid because the panel isn't large enough...

hmm. i thought at one time they said they could feed back to the electric company, but perhaps that's something they are working at finishing.......

Here's Mike's answer to my question, "How much power does your solar panel provide you? Laurie thought your house was entirely off the grid..."

I am not off the grid. I am grid tied and get paid by the Electric Coop for excess that I generate. My system has panels that amount to 2.6 kw. The most I have generated in 1 day is 24 KwH. The largest month was close to 600 KwH.

"Wow. So do you use only power from your solar panels or do you pull from the grid as well?"

I pull from both. We generated about 4500 KwH the first year (this included a period of time when our tracker wasn't working properly.) Our total annual electric usage is about 20,000 KwH.

That is because the house is all electric utilities including heat.

Our smallest month generated was 150 KwH. This happened when the tracker motor that has the panels move east to west failed and the panels were stuck in an inefficient position. The motor was replaced under warranty. However we had to wait all winter to get the motor replaced because it couldn't be done when it was cold.

So that panel isn't large enough to cover everything, but it does generate excess at times that is sold back.

thanks for clarifying what they were doing.......

it's a concept i wish i could do, but i know that it takes a lot to get started.

oh! and welcome, renewablesnow. when i first saw your name i thought it was renewable SNOW.......just can't take the minnesota out of the kids.......