We had storm Eorwyn and our electric was off for about a day and a half. It's amazing how slow time seems to go when you have nothing to distract you and are in pitch darkness !
My EV can do vehicle to load, basically has a standard 3-pin mains socket that can supply around 3KW, more than enough to get the central heating, lights, internet and TV going, and then turn off most of that to boil a kettle.
We made up what is lovingly called a suicide cable, turned off the incoming mains, and plugged one side into the car and the other into a wall outlet, the thinking being that would basically provide 240v to everywhere, and we'd just need to ensure that combined it didn't exceed the 3KW.
It mostly worked as above, but for some reason the central heating (oil), it's controller, and the various actuators got no power. Our house is old enough to have older style plug in fuses. The only difference I could see is that the heating circuit was going thru an RCD on the mains board. I don't know enough about the mains board so unclear as to whether it was being supplied via a separate tail after the meter compared to the reset of the electrics. I did note that my EV charging port was also not getting any power (i.e I could not access its control panel via the network). That circuit was newly added a couple of years ago, and also has an RCD.
So is it possible that the RCDs prevent the electric flow in the way I assumed it should, or is it more likely the reason is that the Heating (and EV port) are on separate tails and therefore independent of the fuseboard ? If so that would imply turning off the mains at the fuseboard would not isolate power to the heating and EV power, which would seem "strange".
My EV can do vehicle to load, basically has a standard 3-pin mains socket that can supply around 3KW, more than enough to get the central heating, lights, internet and TV going, and then turn off most of that to boil a kettle.
We made up what is lovingly called a suicide cable, turned off the incoming mains, and plugged one side into the car and the other into a wall outlet, the thinking being that would basically provide 240v to everywhere, and we'd just need to ensure that combined it didn't exceed the 3KW.
It mostly worked as above, but for some reason the central heating (oil), it's controller, and the various actuators got no power. Our house is old enough to have older style plug in fuses. The only difference I could see is that the heating circuit was going thru an RCD on the mains board. I don't know enough about the mains board so unclear as to whether it was being supplied via a separate tail after the meter compared to the reset of the electrics. I did note that my EV charging port was also not getting any power (i.e I could not access its control panel via the network). That circuit was newly added a couple of years ago, and also has an RCD.
So is it possible that the RCDs prevent the electric flow in the way I assumed it should, or is it more likely the reason is that the Heating (and EV port) are on separate tails and therefore independent of the fuseboard ? If so that would imply turning off the mains at the fuseboard would not isolate power to the heating and EV power, which would seem "strange".
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