Lightning Strikes

To Carl’s chagrin and my glee, the 1999 Dodge rolled onto NPR’s donation truck without breaking down. 

I lost confidence in the Dodge three years ago, when the brakes became mere suggestions. But Carl—ever faithful, ever hopeful—stuck by the truck, defending it. “It works!” As if it were a dependable phenom, a version of Hercules holding up the world, not a miracle of jerry-rigged wires and duct tape.

But Carl exhibited hints of disloyalty when he would furtively put down his name on the waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck, a Canoo, a F-150 Ford Lightning, a Rivian, an Alpha Truck. He was on the hunt for a 4-wheel drive electric truck. The question being, would any of them be released before the truck breathed its last?

A couple of months ago, our Dodge Resuscitator mechanic told Carl that the old truck wouldn’t pass its 2023 inspection. This was around the same time that Elon Musk proved part of his mind had been left on the moon, replaced with a glob of hubris fit for the gods. We began to wonder about our 2018 Model 3 Tesla, which had taken to braking hard in the middle of the highway for no apparent reason—a tick crossing its path? A tweet downloaded instead of a relevant upgrade?—and the Dodge temporarily lost its brakes while going down the driveway. Carl upped his game. So did Ford. On a sunny November morning, Carl practically danced into my office to suggest we take a spin to Keene where we would find, in stock and for sale, no less than two F-150 Ford Lightnings. What did I think?

If you have read my memoir, you know I like to window shop. It does no harm.

We drove to Keene. My basic requirements: The new truck would have to have a 300-mile range on a full charge and have CCS (combined charging system) capability that would transform the truck into a battery bank for the house.

Ice Blue. Voluptuous. Roomy. Smooooooth. Quiet. My first thought: if necessary, in a disaster, there’s room for the cats and chickens in here. My second thought: we could drive across the country in this—with our espresso machine fitting tidily in the frunk.* [*Frunk = a front trunk]

As we sat waiting for the salesperson to get the papers for us to sign, Carl asked how I was feeling. I replied, “This looks like one of our spontaneous combustion moments.”

Also in my memoir: we will talk about something like buying an electric truck for months, maybe even years, and then one day, we hit the Go! button. From any other perspective than ours, it looks like a spur-of-the-moment decision. It’s not.

I dubbed the truck “The Monster”—an electric vehicle of such size and ostentation that I look at it with horror and am afraid to drive it. When we are on the road, we tower, and the road feels too narrow. 

Regardless, we bought the 230 miles-a-charge truck (which, in winter, is about equal to 180 miles-a-charge). And discovered that, because we live off-grid, the Ford’s CCS’s potential to provide back-up power to the house won’t work.

That last statement, of course, being a gauntlet tossed down that Carl then picked up by inviting our solar panel installer, Greg Blake of SouthPac Solar, to the house. Within an hour, they had a plan: our house’s electrical panel has an empty circuit-y thingie marked “GRID.” An electrician could wire a new plug in the garage for the CCS into which we could then plug the sun-charged Monster. That wire would go into and throughout the house, eventually ending at our house panel’s GRID plug. Voila! The truck will charge the house.

How can this miracle be? Houses (in theory) don’t move. Cars and trucks can go from zero to sixty in seconds. That requires power. Our house has 24 kWs of stored energy when the battery bank is full. The truck has 92 kWs of stored energy when its batteries are full. Currently (no pun intended) we can access a continuous flow of energy up to 9.6 kWs of the truck’s power through its 220-volt outlet in the pick-up bed, designed for construction site use.

After writing a draft of this post, I asked Carl to review it and correct any errors. In the course of a convoluted discussion that went deeper and deeper into the mechanics of electricity, he realized that in fact we don’t need the CCS bi-directional charger. The Royal-We-Carl and Greg had discovered, through experimentation, that the GRID plug in the inverter will only accept grid power (which we don’t have by virtue of being off-grid…). That temporary setback made way for a new idea: “We” will wire the 220-volt output of the truck to a switch where the generator connects to the inverter. We can then choose which to use when our batteries are low: the generator or the truck.

Fascinated? My eyes are glazed. Suffice it to say this is our life off-grid and we have renamed The Monster “The Portogrid.”