Fathom's bidirectional AC power can power your home (V2H)

[Snakebitten]

I'm not one to freak out about subscriptions. They just have to pass the sniff test for my personal value-equation. Afterall, I have all kinds of subscriptions in modern life. Subscriptions are consumption and convenience costs.

Having said that, I will be very disappointed if there's a 240v inverter onboard, but I can't access it's output anytime anywhere via a disruption panel/outlet in the truck. I'm an avid user of both Ford's 7.2KW ProPower in my Powerboost, as well as GMC 7.2KW "Energy sharing" in my Denali EV truck.

Yeah, I have both. I'm an hopeless addict for electrification trucks. I love driving rolling grids.

Hopefully Ford doesn't lock that inverter behind the V2H feature exclusively. That wouldn't make sense after the Lightning and Powerboost. They've set precedent for things like this

 

[msieczkowski]

This

 

[msieczkowski]

A subscription makes sense for the "allow your battery to be used by the grid" piece. Ford will have to maintain infrastructure to communicate with all the utilities that participate. That isn't free and if you included the lifetime cost of maintaining that to the vehicle cost people would complain the Fathom costs too much and it would also be unfair to the people who never use it. The home backup piece is too vague at this point to judge.

 

[chl]

The Lightning owners on here are all too familiar with Ford's first attempt at this. The Ford Charge Station Pro was paired with the Sunrun Home Integration System (link) Cost a lot of money, had many software issues, lots of finger pointing, etc. Sounds like all they did here was to now use the truck inverter but kept a lot of the expensive hardware. Oh, and added a new monthly subscription.

Hooking a Lightning or EcoBoost's bed outlet to a generator inlet on your electrical panel is the way to go if all you need is occasional emergency power. So much so that Ford is now promoting it's own generator cable/adapter that attaches from the bed outlet to a Generlink meter base (link). Total cost under $2.5K including installation.

Can't see any Lightning owner trusting this new Fathom system.

Yes.
Only took them 3 years to fix the HIS/FCSP bugs (if they're finally fixed now?).

The HIS could integrate with a solar install which is probably why some people bought it.
No mention of that with this new system that I saw.

If all they did was repackage the HIS and reduce it to 2 boxes instead of the way the HIS was configured...

Call me skeptical...

I like the alleged programmability of the Fathom system to off-set peak utility rates, etc., but we Lightning owners all know how much trouble Ford has had in the past getting software 'right' and fixing it when it needs it, something as simple as setting charge current, or time of day to charge, got fouled up by over the air updates now and then.

I hope the Fathom has the PPOB 240v/30a in the bed - I could be happy with a smaller more efficient PU truck like the Fathom - but I'd want to keep my $400 transfer switch emergency home backup system for the rare outage occurrence rather than sink $2500+ installation and subscription fee at this point anyway.

If utility peak rates were to spike it might be a different story.