I justified the lightning purchase to my partner by pointing out having an equivalent whole house battery backup in Tesla power walls would be more expensive than the truck
We've not hooked up the transfer switch yet but we have ran a lot of extension cords during an ice storm last year and kept all our aquariums going, all 700 gallons of them
If you’ve had it for that long without installing the crucial part of what you described above as a major selling point, I think that would have been useful to volunteer in the original comment lol.
The extension cord thing was interesting too, but “I sold my partner on a feature that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth to set up” is super relevant to discussion!
We haven't needed to yet. Our primary concern are those aquariums and it worked wonderfully for them when we needed it. Much better than running through over a hundred dollars a day in propane to keep them running, and the truck parks in an insulated garage so no cords to a generator through a window letting the cold in
Have you seen the prices of pre-owned Honda/Toyota sedans that are less than 5 years old? There are absolutely cars out there where trading in your new car after 3-4 years can make sense depending on the cost of the car, the depreciation curve, and whether you want to always be driving a relatively new car. Of course it's almost always going to be a better value proposition to drive the car for 10 years if you can, but that can still depend on depreciation.
A local couple runs a hot food stall at outdoor markets all over the city by backing theirs up to the stall and plugging in all the kitchen things they need into the outlets in the bed.
