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My Experience. When the dealer says a new HV battery is required - don't believe them!

Discussion in 'Gen 2 Prius Care, Maintenance and Troubleshooting' started by cbourque, May 26, 2011.

  1. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    unfortunately, the guide is only for the gen I.
     
  2. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i see where he sells the do it yourself guide, but i don't see where he rebuilds batteries?
     
  3. 2009Prius

    2009Prius A Wimpy DIYer

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    Good timing as I just started looking at the HV battery info from the OBD port in more details. I logged and extracted the 14 block voltages and internal resistances during a 19 mile trip. At first glance they looked fine. Here I plotted each individual block voltage against the average over all 14 blocks:
    [​IMG]
    They seemed to be in a good tight distribution, and so are the internal resistances:
    [​IMG]

    But when I histogramed the delta V (i.e. each individual block voltage minus the average block voltage), one of the block stood out as being weak:
    [​IMG]

    The internal resistance of block 12 also takes a different distribution but I don't know how to interpret it:
    [​IMG]

    This is 2009 Prius bought brand new, never abused, having 20K miles.

    For the experts out there: how bad is that ~0.1 V drop of the block 12? Are we looking at something that's going to fail at any moment or is there still a long way to go?

    Update: Just remembered this old article:
    http://www.artsautomotive.com/publi...battery-failure-analysis-for-the-prius-hybrid

    Looks like I am safe (though not perfect) for now.
     
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  4. usbseawolf2000

    usbseawolf2000 HSD PhD

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    What do you use to pull those data? Scangauge II with xgauge?
     
  5. 2009Prius

    2009Prius A Wimpy DIYer

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  6. usbseawolf2000

    usbseawolf2000 HSD PhD

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    Here is an idea. You can write an application to show the state / health of the HV battery. I am sure many people will be interested in it. This would be very useful for people to find out the health of their HV battery. It will also help the used Prii buyers.
     
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  7. cbourque

    cbourque New Member

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    An update on the vehicle that I sold that started this thread. The buyer drove it back from Houston, TX to Glenville, MN and has put about 2,000 miles on it by now. So far - all is working perfectly well.

    BTW - that PRIIDASH application looks awesome!
     
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  8. richard schumacher

    richard schumacher shortbus driver

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    I like that one of the first things he notes is that full grill blocking even in the dead of winter is not a good idea, because short term temperatures can spike quite high. Maybe those Toyota engineers really did know what they were doing.
     
  9. 2009Prius

    2009Prius A Wimpy DIYer

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    I have been wondering about the strange looking distribution and then I realized I had save the data with coarse precision. I have since increased the precision and collected more data. Now the distribution looks a lot nicer:

    [​IMG]

    Block 12 still seems weak but it doesn't have that funny distribution any longer.

    Other graphs:

    Min and Max HV current (amps):
    [​IMG]

    HV current (amps) as recorded ~1/sec
    [​IMG]

    Other graphs already well labeled:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Enjoy! :)
     
  10. usbseawolf2000

    usbseawolf2000 HSD PhD

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    You worry too much about your battery block :). I think those graphs will become useful in 5 years to compare.
     
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  11. Flying White Dutchman

    Flying White Dutchman Senior Member

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    really nice info 2009 prius
    just want to now if your standard priidash records that HV data or do you need to have some special program that you written?
     
  12. 2009Prius

    2009Prius A Wimpy DIYer

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    Yes the PriiDash program automatically log all the data.
     
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