Power for you when there is none

Johnathan Schloo even went on CBC’s Dragons’ Den last April and won the backing of two of the dragons.

There are not many things I’m afraid of, but power failures are right up there.

I know; I’m supposed to call them outages but that’s just hydro PR the media have agreed to use. When the lights go out, and the furnace and refrigerator stop working, something (or somebody) has failed somewhere, hence a power failure.

Back in 1965, there was a biggie. It plunged most of the eastern United States and parts of Canada into darkness. I was living in Montreal at the time and we had the lights on but much of the world around us didn’t.

In 1998, a crippling ice storm brought just about everything to a halt in the U.S. northeast and Quebec, plus eastern Ontario. In summer 2003, 55 million people, including those of us in Toronto, were without lights for several days after a tree branch touched a power line in Ohio.

In 2013, 230,000 people in and around the GTA were affected when the power went off because of ice. There are lots more stories of trees touching lines and ice building up, but you get the drift.

I am a child of the modern age. I like lights, cable TV, ice cream in summer and stoves that work in winter. Otherwise, I get cranky. I can handle a summertime power failure but the ones in winter spook me out. I don’t like being cold.

Every now and again, I will be walking through Home Depot or Rona, thinking about eating T-bone steak or duck a l’orange for dinner, and wondering how I would cook it if the power went out. What triggered those thoughts? Usually, right there in front of me, would be one of those great big $5,000 “portable” generators that would take over if the electricity stopped working.

“I should get one of those things,” l’d think. “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money but it would be worth it if it would save me from a panic attack because I wouldn’t be able to watch my favourite TV show.”

So last Monday, at the Canadian International AutoShow, which closes Sunday at 6 p.m., by the way, I was a guest on a special edition of the radio show Dave’s Corner Garage that’s heard Saturday mornings on AM 740 in Toronto and on Sirius satellite radio at other times during the weekend. A bunch of us were sitting around talking about insurance for classic cars and rust protection and how to get out of a car lease and stuff like that and then a guy named Jonathan Schloo took over the mic and spoke for five minutes and I swear I heard him solve all of my problems.

In short, the Toronto inventor who’s just over 50 but looks 35 said I don’t have to buy a $5,000 generator to put out back of my house on my deck. Why? Because there is a generator sitting in the driveway out front and it’s called my car. Huh? To make what could be a long story short, you use a transfer case to take power from your car’s battery and run it into your house through an extension cord. That’s right. It’s that simple. You attach what’s called the “CarGenerator” to your car’s battery with cables, shut the hood, turn on the car, close and lock the doors, use an extension cord to go from the transfer case into your house and plug it into your furnace and Bob’s your uncle.

If you want to power up your fridge and turn on your TV and some lights, you can buy a generator transfer panel at Staples and you’ll very quickly be in business.

Schloo even went on CBC’s Dragons’ Den last April and won the backing of two of the dragons. He couldn’t say anything about it, though, till October when the program went out on the air. Now he has funding and it’s full-speed ahead.

So how did all of this come about?

“I ran a tech company for 20 years,” Schloo said, “and after I sold the company I bought an Airstream trailer. We love to travel — my wife, our teenage daughter and our two dogs. One of the things we found out early on is that some of the best camping sites — provincial parks, private businesses — don’t have power. We’d tried to generate our own — we have five solar panels on the roof — but there just wasn’t enough juice to make a cappuccino or watch TV.

“I said to myself, ‘Why should I buy a 100-pound generator and drag it around with me when I already own 75 per cent of a generator that, at the moment, is pulling this trailer? So I built an earlier version of the CarGenerator for our camping trips.

“In 2013, Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. That got me thinking. I was sitting on my front porch (in the Riverdale part of Toronto) and I thought, ‘I wonder if this thing (that they used for camping) could run my furnace?’ Later that year, the ice storm hit. We were without power for three days. I tried it and it actually worked. It ran the furnace to heat the house — it kept the whole house warm — and we used our fridge, our internet router, a couple of computers, some of our lights, and we lived comfortably. Other people had their pipes freeze and so on. It was horrible.

“But with this, it’s now avoidable.”

The thing can run for between 50 and 70 hours, the amount of time it takes your car or truck to use the gas in its tank before refuelling is necessary.

It’s light — it only weighs 16 pounds, which is the weight of a standard 10-pin bowling ball — and uses less gasoline than a regular generator. If your car is tuned properly — and what modern vehicle isn’t? — it’s cleaner to idle than to actually run the thing.

You can buy the CarGenerator at the company’s website, cargenerator.com. It will set you back $695 plus tax and it comes with a furnace connection kit.

There is no maintenance. You use it and when you’re finished, you put it in a closet until the next time.

See what you can find out about at the AutoShow?

Norris McDonald is a columnist for Toronto Star Wheels and is a consultant for the Canadian International AutoShow.