Power Your Home with your TESLA Car Battery - 24 Hour Challenge

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Wouldn't it be nice to use your Tesla car to power your entire home? Okay, here we go.

[00:00:13]That's exactly what I'm going to do in this video thanks to this V2L, which is also known as a vehicle to load from Tillyard. Here we are 19 hours later. My battery just reached 20%. This has been very, very reliable. This offers 3.5 kW, which is 29 amps. It's actually rated for 30 amps output. A lot of people are hesitant to get one of these because they think it's going to void their warranty. Let me read what the manual says here. Will this affect the vehicle warranty? The device operates in accordance with the vehicle's charging protocol. During use, the vehicle's central control display shows a charging status and the backend data only records a single charging session. This will not affect the vehicle warranty, so you can use it with confidence. The way this operates is you need to have a CCS connector system built into your car, which if you have a 2022 model or later, you're going to have that functionality built in. If you don't, it's going to cost around $330 to add the CCS capability inside of your car. Okay. To use this, I do recommend getting a table. You can set it down on the ground because this cable here is quite long, but to turn it on, it's a little bit tricky. Uh, it took me a while to figure this out. You have to double tap and then hold it down. If you don't double tap, sometimes it won't turn on. This light will be red and you're going to wait for that to turn yellow. Once it's yellow, that means you can now plug in the adapter into your car and begin charging. So, let's wait for it to turn yellow. There, it just turned yellow. We do have to open this up. If you press the button here, it's not going to respond like a normal adapter would. So, I just open up the port like this. It's a white light here.

[00:02:11]I plug it in. It's going to turn blue.

[00:02:14]And you're going to wait. This is flashing green. It's negotiating now to establish a token saying I am a valid charging device. And now it turns on.

[00:02:24]And inside of your car, you're going to see that it is charging. So now from here, I can plug in my shop vac. And if I turn it on here, you're going to notice it will not trip at all.

[00:02:36]So I'm a big fan of that. Now, how often are you going to use your car to use a shopvac? I don't know. But there are so many use cases with something like this, especially when you go camping. Like I said, for power outages, which is what I'm going to test next. This V2L also has a fan built into it. I can feel the air coming out right now. And you can also adjust this little switch here for extra grounding. There's an SD card, so you can update this with new firmware.

[00:03:05]These are some troubleshooting ports.

[00:03:07]And then an Ethernet port. You're probably never ever going to use these.

[00:03:11]One nice thing with this unit is that you can get it in 7 kilowatts which is for 240 volt AC. So the connectors would be different coming out and then you can power your washing machine or your dryer or any high voltage high current device.

[00:03:26]That's a really awesome option that has previously been limited to Europe and overseas but is now available for US market. Okay, here's my breaker box. I'm gonna flip the main switch and simulate a power outage. So, everything's going to get dark. Here we go.

[00:03:45]I've plugged in an extension cable here.

[00:03:48]And this is going all the way over and into my house. So, it's coming here and branching off. The dehumidifier is running away. You can see it's at 52% humidity. And I have the extension cables coming over here to a refrigerator. So, we've got that plugged in over there. And here's our internet modem. And we have our router right over there. Following the cables all the way up the stairs and into the main area.

[00:04:18]You're going to see we have the refrigerator plugged in. We have the microwave plugged in. And we have the rice cooker plugged in. And then the power continues going out into the living room to power all of our lights.

[00:04:35]Let's take a look. We've got two refrigerators, a dehumidifier, we have a rice cooker, we have lights, we have a modem, a router. We're consuming right now 868 watts. My daughter is going to turn on the microwave and we're going to see what this shoots up to. 3 2 1 Okay, there she goes. She's turning it on. 1750.

[00:05:01]So, we're not even close to the 3,500 watts being used. There we go. 2,600.

[00:05:10]That is so awesome to see. So, microwave works just fine. And we are still not overloaded. Let's try out the shopvac and see if this will will actually turn on. So, we do have an extra port here where we can plug it in. Okay, this could kill the circuit. Let's find out here. and turn it on.

[00:05:35]Wow, it still works.

[00:05:47]Oh, we reached the max level there.

[00:05:50]We're 3 hours into this little experiment. My battery is at 64%.

[00:05:56]Now, I'm loving this, but my wife hates me. She is extremely frustrated. We've had a couple things pop up. My daughters, they wanted to take a bath.

[00:06:06]Well, we have an electric water heater that's mounted on our wall. It's ondemand heated water. Well, most people aren't going to have that, but I had to plug that in. And then also, as I mentioned before, we have the dehumidifier running. So, I would say our use case is a little bit unique.

[00:06:25]Maybe it's a worst case, which is good for this experiment, but my wife also wanted to plug in the kettle that we have an electric water heater that heats up water in the kitchen. So, I plugged that in. Also, just in case, I connected our sump pump in the basement. That's run a couple of times. Not really much of a worry for me. The biggest energy hogs in the equation right now are going to be the dehumidifier and the refrigerator. And then obviously whenever we run the microwave, but this experiment's going really, really well, very smoothly. This shuts off at 20%. It has a safety feature, so I'm fully expecting that we will run out of power around lunchtime or maybe dinner tomorrow. Here we are 19 hours later. My battery just reached 20%. I've used up 60% of the battery to power my home for 19 hours. This has been very very reliable. There is one little small thing though. If the power consumption is too low, this will actually shut itself off. I discovered this at 5:20 a.m. when my wife woke up and she said, "We don't have any power." So, I had to scramble to come down here and reset this. And I had a message in my app telling me what had happened. So, I went into the user manual and sure enough, there's a section in here under precautions that says for extended use, enable camping mode on your vehicle to prevent automatic shutdown after 1 hour.

[00:08:00]Now, the one issue I have with that is it runs the fans. You can't turn off the HVAC system. That is a big downer for me. that can use anywhere from 8 to 12% power overnight if you leave the HVAC running inside of your car. So, I asked the factory, can you turn on the toggle for keep accessory power on? And they said yes, that should work. And also, it won't shut itself off for every Tesla vehicle. It depends on the vehicle. So, I'm a little bit unsure about that. But I did have a situation where it did shut itself off. And I'm assuming it's because my dehumidifier went off and a bunch of other devices went off. There's also the possibility that the CCS charger mechanism times out. It might say, "Okay, you've been connected for a very long time now. Your battery should be fully charged." So, that's a possibility. But the fact of the matter is, you may have a couple hiccups here or there, but by and large, it's very, very reliable. I went for six or seven hours where I didn't have the climate mode or camp mode or anything like that turned on. I did turn on the keep accessory power on and that did seem to help. But anyway, I just want to make sure you're aware of that. My wife was vacuuming this morning. Uh we've been running the microwave multiple times. I have a water heater. We have so many different use cases here. So, it's been very practical with the exception of the cords running all throughout my house making a mess of things. That's the only disadvantage. Now, when I came out here to power it back on again to get it running, I had my hand on the device like this and I went ahead and plugged this cord back in. Now, I had all these loads in my house already ready to go. My dehumidifier powered right up. My two refrigerators powered right up and I felt a little tingling sensation in my hand. I quickly released my hand and I was like, "That can't be good." So, I noticed in the user manual on the second to last page, it says that there's a switch for grounding mode.

[00:10:08]It's a little toggle and it defaults to the zero or off position. Oh, charging stopped. It just reached 19%.

[00:10:17]So, it cuts off at 19%, not 20%. Really interesting. I'm going to check inside and see what it says, but the whole unit just shut itself off. When you put it in the one setting, that is for American standards. And that's what I did. And now I haven't had any issues with touching the unit itself. But just bear in mind that may be something to look out for. So, here we are at 19 hours. It lasted for 19 hours. That is pretty cool. I don't know of a way to bypass the 20% threshold. There probably is a way. If I find out, I'll let you know.

[00:10:53]As I found out, there is a way. You can go into the charging menu, and right here is the auto threshold. So, the V2L is assuming the car is setting, which is 20%. The factory recommends leaving it at 20%, but you can bring it down as low as 10%. Also, after you're done using the V2L, I recommend turning this setting back off again just to avoid consuming additional energy. I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on this.

[00:11:19]Would would you be able to use this when you go camping for a power outage? If you are able to anticipate a power outage, you could obviously charge your car up to 90% or higher. And you could actually, let's say your neighborhood has the power outage, you could go across the town with your car, charge it up at a supercharger if one's nearby, and then come back with 90% and you could potentially get 24 hours out of this. Not everybody is going to have a dehumidifier that's running all the time like I did. I think this is a really cool backup to have in case of emergencies and also for camping. Just imagine you could use this to make coffee in the morning when you're camping. Uh lights, obviously, if it's kind of cool outside, you can use it for heating blankets and all sorts of cool things like that. Uh heat little heaters you have around your legs. Also for camping, if you need to blow up an air mattress, you could plug it into here.

[00:12:15]One of those little electric blowers. Uh you could use it for a hair dryer, curling iron, you know, any you guys can get creative. It goes on and on and on.

[00:12:23]Anything you can plug in over 120 volt can be used with this guy. I also have to mention if you use a discount code like techgeeek, you can get 25% off of your order when you get something like this and highly recommended due to the overall cost. I think it's worth it and it's something that you'll be able to use for a very long time. I did confirm from a safety aspect, these are ULlisted for the North American market. So, if you're worried about uh any safety hazards or any issues with it related to that, you don't need to worry. Thanks so much for watching. Have a great day.

[00:13:17]Heat up here.