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You can't do just V2H, but Enphase and others have moved to simpler meter collars and grid disconnect for exactly this reason.

The main question for this thread remains who the Enphase / ISO standards friendly OEMs will be. With Tesla saying they'll allow it now, maybe others will get onboard, but the risk is that they wall themselves off.

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What Enphase/ISO standard is this? I’ve never heard of it, and my attempt to search came up with nothing useful. There’s ISO 15518-20 bidirectional, which seems like it barely solves the problem.

It should be possible for a vehicle’s built-in inverter/charger, the EVSE, and the MID to all cooperate even if all three are from different vendors, but this is not a thing.

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I think the standard is called "V2H". It's unobtanium from what I can tell.

If you have a Ford EV and a SunRun house, then it supposedly has worked for a few years now. (But that's just vehicle to home charging, not the "V2H" standard.)

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It’s unfortunate and inconvenient. However A transfer switch requires <3 minutes to engage. If a car was able to supply 30-50 amp via compatible plug it would work reasonably well even absent unified v2h standard.

Most recent teslas support 20amp at 120v output via official $100 cable adapter. Some other cars support about 20amps too, eg RivianR2. While it falls short of desirable amperage the car manufactures can bridge the gap if they wanted to. Even now I can run the bare minimum of workloads - a full size fridge, a small AC or Microwave, LED lights, and phone chargers.

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A manual switch doesn’t solve the problem: there still needs to be a way to inform the inverter that the switch is open.
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It solves my problem just fine - power critical loads for a few days by spending $100 upfront fir the cable and 5 minutes to manually switch the load. It’s a difference between moving to a hotel for indefinite time and staying put.

Sure you can set a loftier goal and spend tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours solving it. Most people won’t though.

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Sorry, what device are you using to supply power once you've flipped the switch? Sure, you can get a (legal, even) manual transfer switch and plug in a little portable generator, but if we're talking about using your car as a power source, this is not going to work.
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I previously used a portable propane generator for a 30amp inlet to transfer switch. In my test runs it didn’t go that high.

Today I could plug in a car that gives off 20amp into the same inlet, it would limit how much load it can carry, but I could stay below 2.4 kw if needed. Why wouldn’t that work?

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A lot of houses won’t run off 120V/20A. You’ll also need to kludge around the fact that your house wants 120V/240V.

In any case, serious V2H should support much more than 2kW. An EV with a charger with less than 6kW capacity is almost unheard of. Two EVs should be able to supply twice the current. All that’s technically needed is an charger that is physically capable of operating as an inverter (which I believe adds little cost), some way to derive a neutral (the usual solution is a relay and an autotransformer, again not particularly expensive), and the control logic to convince all of the above to actually operate in this mode.

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What about using a step up transformer to send 240V to your panel from the 120V output from some EVs?
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