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The power has been out since yesterday. The whole road is dark. There is five hundred dollars of meat in the freezer getting warmer by the hour, and a furnace in the basement full of fuel doing nothing at all, because the little fan that pushes the warm air cannot turn. And parked twenty feet from your front door sits a machine with a full tank and an engine that already makes electricity every time you drive it. Most folks will never know what it could have done.
I do not own a car. But I have made and stored my own power my whole life, and once you have lived that way, you can look at almost any machine and see whether it makes power or holds it. Your car does both. It always has.
In this video:
✓ Why your car's alternator is already a small generator, and always was
✓ The inverter that lets you use it, and what a good one really costs
✓ The cigarette-lighter mistake that makes most folks give up in four seconds
✓ Why you clamp straight to the battery posts instead
✓ What an idling engine can honestly run: fridge, freezer, lights, furnace fan
✓ The startup surge nobody warns you about
https://eliasyoder.com
The power has been out since yesterday. The whole road is dark. There is five hundred dollars of meat in the freezer getting warmer by the hour, and a furnace in the basement full of fuel doing nothing at all, because the little fan that pushes the warm air cannot turn. And parked twenty feet from your front door sits a machine with a full tank and an engine that already makes electricity every time you drive it. Most folks will never know what it could have done.
I do not own a car. But I have made and stored my own power my whole life, and once you have lived that way, you can look at almost any machine and see whether it makes power or holds it. Your car does both. It always has.
In this video:
✓ Why your car's alternator is already a small generator, and always was
✓ The inverter that lets you use it, and what a good one really costs
✓ The cigarette-lighter mistake that makes most folks give up in four seconds
✓ Why you clamp straight to the battery posts instead
✓ What an idling engine can honestly run: fridge, freezer, lights, furnace fan
✓ The startup surge nobody warns you about
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00The power has been out since yesterday evening. The whole road is dark. Your phone is down to 9%, and
00:07in the freezer out in the garage, there is $500 of meat sitting there getting warmer by the hour, and
00:14the furnace in the basement has fuel in it and heat in it, and it is doing nothing at all,
00:20because the little fan that pushes the warm air through the house cannot turn without electricity.
00:26And the whole time, parked 20 feet from your front door, there is a machine with a full tank of
00:33fuel and an engine built to run 200,000 miles, and it is already making electricity every time you drive
00:42it. It has been sitting there this whole cold night doing nothing, and most folks will never know what it
00:50could have done.
00:51I am Elias Yoder. Now let me be straight with you right at the front, so you know what kind
00:57of man is talking. I do not own a car. I have never driven one. In our community, we do
01:04not, and we never took a wire from the public power company either.
01:08So you might well ask what business a man like me has telling you about the vehicle in your driveway.
01:16Here is my answer. I have made and stored my own electricity my whole life.
01:22When you cut yourself off from the power line on purpose, the way we did, you stop thinking of electricity
01:30as something that comes from far away through a wire and arrives whenever you want it.
01:35You start thinking of it as something you make and something you keep. And once you understand it that way,
01:42once you have lived it, you can look at almost any machine and see whether it makes power or stores
01:49power.
01:49And your car does both. It has been doing both the entire time you have owned it. Nobody ever told
01:57you, so you never looked.
01:59Let me say one thing, and then I will not bring it up again. I have gathered these old ways
02:06into a book over at EliasYoder.com. If you want it, it is there. That is all.
02:13Now let us talk about that machine in your driveway. First, I want to give you the picture that makes
02:19all the rest of it plain, because if you get this one idea, everything after it will make sense on
02:26its own.
02:27It is the idea I was raised on, and it is the whole of how we think about power.
02:33A battery is a bucket. That is all it is. It holds a certain amount and no more, and when
02:40you draw from it, it goes down.
02:42Now, a bucket by itself is no good to you if there is nothing filling it. So you need two
02:49things, a thing that fills the bucket and a way to drink from the bucket.
02:53In our cellar, the bucket is the bank of batteries in the corner. The thing that fills it is the
03:00sun on the roof, or in the old days, a little engine on the bench that we would fire up
03:06on wash day, and we drink from it through the wires that run to the pump and the lights.
03:11Now look at your car with that same eye. Your car has a battery. There is your bucket. And your
03:19car has a thing that fills it, and that thing is called the alternator.
03:23It is a small generator bolted to the front of the engine, and it has been spinning and making power
03:30every single minute you have ever driven that vehicle.
03:33It has to. Something has to run your headlights and your radio and your heater fan and charge your telephone
03:41and keep that battery full.
03:43That is the alternator's whole job. It is a power plant the size of a coffee can, and you have
03:50owned one your whole adult life without ever thinking of it as anything at all.
03:55So your car already has the bucket, and it already has the thing that fills the bucket.
04:02What it does not have, and this is the entire matter, is a way for you to drink from that
04:08bucket without driving anywhere.
04:10That is the missing piece. And that piece is a small box that you can buy. The box is called
04:18an inverter.
04:19Now, why do you need it? Because the power in your car battery is not the same kind of power
04:26as the power in your wall.
04:28Your car battery gives 12 volts, and it gives it in what they call direct current, a steady push all
04:35one way.
04:36The sockets in your wall give 120 volts, and they give it an alternating current, a push that goes back
04:43and forth.
04:44Your refrigerator and your lamps and your furnace fan are all built to expect the wall kind.
04:52So you need a little box that takes the 12 volts from the car and turns it into the 120
04:58volts that your appliances want.
05:01That box is the inverter, and that is all it does. And here is what will surprise you.
05:07A good one, strong enough to run a refrigerator, is not some rare and costly thing.
05:14A 2,000 watt pure sine wave inverter runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 to $200.
05:23And that is the whole purchase. You already own the engine. You already own the fuel in the tank.
05:30You already own the thing that makes the power. You are not buying a generator at all.
05:37You are buying the one missing piece that lets you use the generator you have owned all along.
05:44Now, before you go any further, I have to save you from the first mistake, because near everybody makes it,
05:51and it makes them give up on the whole idea.
05:55You are looking at that little socket in the dash, the one you charge your phone from, and you are
06:00looking at that little socket in the dash, the one you charge your phone from.
06:00And you are thinking that is where the inverter plugs in. It is not.
06:05That socket is protected by a very small fuse, and it will only pass about 150 watts before it gives
06:13up.
06:14Your refrigerator wants more than that just to wake up.
06:18So, if you plug a real inverter into that little socket, you will blow the fuse inside of a few
06:25seconds and decide the whole business is foolishness.
06:28You do not use that socket. You go straight to the source.
06:34You clamp the inverter directly onto the two posts of the car battery itself under the hood.
06:41The same two posts the jumper cables clamp onto.
06:45Red to the positive post, black to the negative.
06:48Now you are not sipping through a little straw.
06:52You are drinking straight from the bucket, and the inverter can pull all the power it needs.
06:59And I will tell you, this is exactly the same rule we live by with our own battery bank.
07:05You never run a house through some thin little cord.
07:09You run heavy cable, and you run it as short as you can, straight off the terminals.
07:16The old man who taught me had a habit I have never been able to shake.
07:21After an hour of the system running, he would lay his flat hand on the cable.
07:26If it was warm, the wire was too thin and power was leaking out as heat and being wasted.
07:33If it was cool, you had done it right.
07:37I still do it. Every time.
07:40Thin wire and long runs are where your power quietly bleeds away.
07:46So now you have the inverter clamped to the battery.
07:50You run a heavy-duty outdoor extension cord from the inverter in through a window or a door into the
07:57house.
07:57You start the engine and let it idle.
08:01That is the whole machine.
08:03That is it.
08:05Now, let me tell you honestly what that idling engine can actually carry,
08:10because I do not want to promise you the moon and have you disappointed.
08:15At a plane idle, sitting in the driveway, your alternator is making somewhere around 40 to 50 amps of usable
08:23power.
08:24Put in the terms you and I think in, that is roughly 500 to 700 watts of steady power all
08:32day without ever touching the pedal.
08:35Hold it at a fast idle and most vehicles will give you a thousand watts and a bit more.
08:42What does 500 to 700 watts run?
08:45A refrigerator, humming along, draws about 150 watts.
08:51A chest freezer, about the same.
08:54A handful of the modern efficient lights, almost nothing, may be 40 watts for the whole house.
09:02Charging every telephone in the family, near nothing.
09:05A furnace blower fan, depending on the furnace, somewhere between 300 and 600 watts.
09:12So you can keep your freezer cold, your refrigerator cold, your lights on, your phones charged, and your furnace fan
09:22turning off one idling engine, if you are sensible about running them.
09:27But here is the catch, and the cheap videos never tell you this, so I will.
09:34It is the startup.
09:35When a refrigerator compressor kicks on, or a furnace fan first starts turning, it grabs a big gulp of power
09:43for about one second, sometimes three or four times what it uses to run steady.
09:48A refrigerator that hums along at 150 watts might yank 1200 watts for that first instant.
09:55If your inverter cannot give it that gulp, the whole thing stumbles and shuts down.
10:01That gulp is the entire reason you want a 2000 watt inverter, even though you will almost never draw 2000
10:08watts.
10:08The big number is not for the running, the big number is for the startup.
10:13And this is the same lesson we learned on our own bank, and learned it the hard way.
10:18You do not size your system for the calm, you size it for the surge.
10:23Anybody who has ever tried to start a big saw off a battery bank, learns that once and never forgets
10:29it.
10:30Now that is already more than most folks on your street know, but I promised you the part that matters
10:35most, and here it is.
10:37Because running that engine hour after hour, all day and all night, is loud, it burns a great deal of
10:43fuel, and you should never run it while you sleep.
10:46So the question is, how do you make a little power last a long time?
10:51And this is the part I know in my bones, because it is not a car trick at all.
10:56It is exactly how we have run our own place for generations.
10:59You do not run the engine steady, you run it in cycles.
11:04And the way you do that is by adding one thing, a second battery.
11:08A deep cycle battery, the kind made for a boat or a camper, and it runs about $100 to $150
11:14at the farm store.
11:16Here is why this changes everything, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
11:22Your refrigerator does not actually need power every minute. It is an insulated box.
11:27The compressor only needs to run maybe a third of the hour to hold the cold.
11:32The rest of the time, it is just sitting there, coasting.
11:35So if you run your car engine 60 minutes an hour to serve a refrigerator that only works 20 minutes
11:41an hour,
11:41you are burning a great deal of fuel to do a very little work.
11:45That is waste, and waste is the one thing my people cannot abide.
11:49So you do what we do. You make the bucket bigger, you fill it fast, and then you let it
11:55pour out slow.
11:56You take that deep cycle battery and you set it in the house.
12:00You run your inverter off that battery, not off the car.
12:04Your refrigerator, your freezer, your lights, they all run quietly off that battery.
12:10No engine noise, no fumes.
12:12All through the evening and all through the night, silent, while the battery slowly pours out into your house.
12:19Then, perhaps twice a day, you start the car and you run a heavy cable from the car battery to
12:24the house battery,
12:25and you let that engine pour power back into the deep cycle battery hard and fast at the alternator's full
12:32output.
12:33In about an hour of running, you have refilled the bucket.
12:36Then you shut the engine off, unhook it, and go back to running silent off the stored power for another
12:4210 or 12 hours.
12:44Two hours of engine running in a day, instead of 24.
12:48Perhaps a gallon and a half of fuel in a whole day, instead of 15.
12:52That 15-gallon tank in your driveway will now carry you a week or better.
12:57And your nights are silent and warm, with no engine running under your bedroom window,
13:02no fumes to worry about, and no neighbor lying awake angry at you.
13:07The engine fills the bucket fast.
13:09The battery holds it.
13:11The house drinks it slow.
13:13And here is the part that ties the whole thing together for me.
13:16That is precisely, exactly, how we have always done it.
13:21The little gasoline engine out in the shed never ran all day.
13:24You fired it up on wash day, or when the bank got low.
13:28It charged the batteries hard for an hour or two, and then it shut off.
13:32And the house ran quiet off the stored power the rest of the time.
13:36That is not a clever new idea I am selling you.
13:39That is a 100-year-old plain farm arrangement, and you have just rebuilt it in your own driveway
13:45out of a vehicle you already owned and one battery from the farm store.
13:51Now let me answer the careful questions.
13:54Because a man should never hand you half a tool.
13:58Will idling your car an hour or two a day hurt it?
14:01No. Folks sit in traffic and in drive-through lines longer than that without a thought.
14:07Keep an eye on the temperature gauge and make sure it is not creeping up while it sits still,
14:13and you are fine.
14:15Where do you run it?
14:17Outside. Always outside.
14:20Never in a closed garage.
14:22Never in a shed.
14:24Never with the door down.
14:26I want you to hear this one plain,
14:28because this is the thing in the whole video that can actually kill you and your family.
14:34The exhaust from that engine is poison,
14:38and it has no smell, and it will fill a closed space
14:42and kill people in their sleep without ever waking them.
14:47So the car sits out in the open driveway, always,
14:51with the fumes blowing away from the house,
14:53and you run your cord in through a window on the far side,
14:57not the near side.
14:59You treat that exhaust with the same hard respect we give an open flame in a barn full of dry
15:05hay.
15:06No exceptions, no shortcuts, not even for five minutes, not even in the rain.
15:13Outside.
15:15Why the pure sine wave inverter and not the cheaper kind?
15:20Because the cheap ones put out a rough, choppy sort of power,
15:24and some things do not like it.
15:26Certain furnace control boards, some of the newer refrigerators, and anything medical.
15:32The pure sine wave inverter makes clean, smooth power, the same as your wall gives,
15:39and it will run anything without complaint.
15:42It costs a little more.
15:44We learned a long time ago that the cheap tool which ruins the expensive machine was never cheap at all.
15:52And why a deep cycle battery for storage instead of just another car battery?
15:58Because a starting battery hates being drained down deep.
16:03It is built to give one big burst to turn the engine over, and then be filled right back up.
16:10Draw it down low a few times, and it is finished.
16:13A deep cycle battery is built for exactly the work we are asking of it,
16:19to be drawn down slow and deep and filled back up over and over for years.
16:26It is the right bucket for the job.
16:30Now, one more thing.
16:31For those of you thinking this is all fine for somebody with a new house,
16:35but your place is old, or you rent, or you have no business touching the breaker box.
16:42You are right, and you should not touch it.
16:45So here is what you do instead, and it is the plainest part of the whole business.
16:51You do not wire anything into your house.
16:55You do not touch your panel.
16:57You skip the house entirely.
17:00You run an extension cord.
17:03A heavy outdoor cord, the thick kind.
17:06You run it from the inverter, in through a window, and you plug your refrigerator directly into it.
17:13Then another to the freezer.
17:16Put a power strip on the end, and charge every phone in the house.
17:20You are not powering your house.
17:23You are powering the four or five things that actually matter, one cord at a time.
17:30No panel.
17:31No permit.
17:32No electrician.
17:34A renter can do this.
17:36A hundred-year-old farmhouse can do this.
17:39And for the firmus, here is one worth checking tonight, while the sun is up and there is no storm.
17:46A great many furnaces, especially the newer ones, are not hardwired at all.
17:52They are simply plugged into an ordinary outlet, tucked in behind the unit, where nobody ever looks.
17:59If yours is, then you can unplug the furnace from the wall, and plug it into your cord from the
18:05car,
18:06and your gas furnace will run off your truck, and warm air will move through your whole house again.
18:14If yours is hardwired, that is a small job for an electrician on a calm, sunny day.
18:20Go look now.
18:22Pull the refrigerator out a few inches, and find the plug.
18:26Look behind the furnace, and see if there is a cord.
18:30Know the answer before you need it, and not in the dark with a flashlight in your teeth.
18:37Now, why did nobody ever tell you any of this?
18:40And I want to be careful here, because I am not going to tell you there was a scheme, a
18:45room full of men deciding to keep you ignorant.
18:48It is quieter than that, and in a way it is sadder, because it needed nobody to plan it at
18:55all.
18:56Before the wires came out to the country, a farmer understood his own power.
19:01He had a windmill, or a little engine, he had a bank of batteries in the cellar, and he knew
19:07exactly where his electricity came from, because he made it with his own hands.
19:14Then the lines came down the roads, and for most folks, that was a fine thing, and I will not
19:20pretend otherwise.
19:22But something quiet happened alongside it.
19:24Once, the socket in the wall never ran dry, there was no reason to understand any of it anymore.
19:32You just paid the bill.
19:34And within a generation or two, the knowing simply stopped being handed down, because nobody needed it, and nobody profited
19:43by teaching it.
19:44There is no money in telling a man he already owns a generator.
19:49There is steady money in selling him one.
19:52So the old knowing grew over like a path nobody walks.
19:57Nobody buried it.
19:59It just stopped being carried forward.
20:02Well, let us carry it forward again.
20:06Here is what I would ask of you.
20:08Tomorrow, in the daylight, before any storm, go out to your driveway and pop the hood and find the two
20:16battery posts, the ones the jumper cables clamp onto.
20:20Then go look behind your refrigerator and your furnace for the plug.
20:26Just look.
20:28Then come down to the comments and tell me.
20:31Tell me whether you knew your car was a generator all this time, or whether nobody ever taught you either.
20:38And tell me how old your house is and what part of the country you are in, because I read
20:44them, and other folks read them too.
20:47And the next time we sit down together, I am going to show you the other half of this.
20:52Because keeping the freezer cold is one thing, but keeping a house warm is another.
20:59And there is a reason an old farmhouse holds its heat through a hard winter, while the new house next
21:06door goes cold in a night.
21:09It is not magic, and it is not luck.
21:12It is built right into the walls, and you have walked past it a hundred times, the same as you
21:18walked past that generator in your driveway.
21:21I will show you the whole of it.
21:23So go find your battery posts, get yourself a proper inverter and a deep cycle battery, run the engine outside
21:32and never in the garage, fill the bucket fast and drink from it slow, and you will never again lie
21:40awake in a cold, dark house wondering what you might have done.
21:45The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
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