Prius powers house — it’s true!

Can a car power a house? Apparently so.

A group of curious individuals got together recently and decided to see if they could find enough fuel in a running Toyota Prius to power a house. They discovered that they could, and they did.

The project is called PriusUPS. The UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply, something that electricity from the grid down the street just can’t match. As long as that Prius is running outside and it is plugged into the wall, you can run your lights and your computers by it.

The brains behind this idea don’t envision this as a long-term solution; rather, they prefer to think of it as a stop-gap measure, to “get you through” those times when the power goes out. Still, this is the kind of thinking that science needs, the kind of thinking that turns standard assumptions on their heads.