This little-known way to power your house could come in handy during an outage

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Half of EV owners already use bidirectional power regularly.
• Three of four future EV owners are open to investing in a V2H setup.
• Most V2H car owners bought their EVs with backup power in mind.

Imagine you're halfway through making dinner on a weeknight when the lights flicker and the power goes out. While the abrupt end to your home chef experience is inconvenient, the bigger issue is that your gas furnace still needs electricity to run, and it's supposed to drop into the 20s overnight.

Now imagine that while everyone else is rifling through their junk drawer for flashlights and batteries, you glance at your phone and see a pop-up notification that your EV has switched to backup mode just as all your lights turn back on. 

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