Prius Gen 1 Batteries Replaced with Gen II Engine Revving with Triangle

Get a discharge ready grid charger like this one in the PriusChat shop but for 2001-2003 and run a few cycles.

Hybrid Battery Preventative Maintenance Grid Charger for 2004-2009 Toyota Prius - PriusChat Shop

You may have to go directly to his website to get it, I didn't see your model it in the Priuschat shop
Store - Hybrid Automotive - Honda & Toyota Grid Chargers

 

What does that mean exactly ?
Did you replace the whole battery or just some of the individual cells or all of them ??
And were the new parts really new or "reconditioned" ??
Who did the actual work ??

 

• Where are you located so we can recommend some independent Prius shops that might be able to help?
• Do you have a Prius aware scanner to read out the 19 module-pair voltages?
• How did you balance-charge the modules?

GOOD LUCK!
Bob Wilson

 

I have the identical symptoms, reving, break light, triangle of death. But I'm on the original battery 2001. Would like to hear what you did, if it was worth it. i have the same codes too. When you said "drive it to balance it out" is that possible?

 

When you round up 38 modules to assemble a battery, there are two kinds of matching that you want to pay attention to. First, you want 38 modules that are as close as possible to the same physical, chemical condition in terms of their capacity to take and store a charge. That capacity is measured in ampere-hours (Ah) and brand new ones are supposed to be 6.5 Ah. Old dried out ones could be 2 Ah or less. Careful testing on smart-charging equipment is how you can measure the modules and (assuming you have more than 38 to start with) pick the 38 that are matched the best.

Second, once you have a bunch of modules that are decently matched in capacity, you also want to make sure they are all charged to the same level before you put the battery into service. If not, then in use the ones that were less charged will reach full discharge first, and can then be ruined when the stronger modules around them continue to flow current.

If your modules are matched OK physically but their states of charge aren't balanced, there is a possibility of improving that by a very slow, controlled overcharge. That will bring the most charged modules up to full first, and then the continuing charge slightly overcharges those (very gently to avoid overheating and overpressurizing them) while bringing the less-charged ones eventually up to match. You can't do that through normal driving because the car normally tries to maintain a state of charge around 60% which is just not high enough to have this balancing effect. You may be able to do it with a "grid charger" and you can see other posts in this forum where those are for sale. The car does seem to have a balance-charge mode it goes into on rare occasions, where it really will push the battery up to 100% charge for a couple minutes and then run it back down to 60%. Several of us have seen our cars do that, but there's no obvious way to tell it to do that. It happens for some undocumented programmed reason of its own.

If the 38 modules assembled into the battery were not well matched to begin with, none of this will help, and the mismatch will just grow inexorably worse.

-Chap

 

Personally I don't use ANY original gen1 modules anymore. They are all old and tired and whatever tricks you do to squeeze more life out of them is just a short/medium term solution. Best to replace all modules with Gen2 or Gen3 modules that are appropriately balanced capacity wise....unless you like taking the battery apart multiple times.

Had a 2001 in the shop last week with only 77k miles, battery hosed simply due to age, not usage.

Looking for a cheap, quick, quality solution? You can only pick 2.