gas gauge down 4 bars after only 71 miles?!

Hi there -- also a Portland area new owner of a used 2007, but I upgraded from a 2002. I highly recommend the grill blocking idea.

I'm a professional computer nerd and a bit on the obsessive compulsive side, so I tend to frequently watch a number of engine parameters using the Torque app (Torque Pro (OBD 2 & Car) - Android Apps on Google Play) on my phone. I can tell you that the car generally tries to keep the combustion engine coolant at around 160-185F and that when it's reasonably warm out (55F+) it pretty consistently manages to get it into that range within the first 5 minutes of the car being turned on.

In the last week or two though, as the highs have dipped down into the 30's, it's now taking my car as long as 10-15 minutes to get that temp up to 160 and if I'm running errands, it looks like leaving it parked outside while I pop into a store for as little as 10 minutes can cause it to drop back down below 100. (To more veteran readers, yes, that's the number from after the coolant heat storage pump has had a chance to kick in...)

With the parameters like that, my MFD mileage has also dropped down into the 20's like yours, whereas previously it was pretty consistently mid 40's.

Get a couple of tubes of 1/2 inch foam pipe insulation (about a buck at the plumbing aisle of Lowe's, Shop Frost King 1/2-in x 6-ft Foam Plumbing Tubular Pipe Insulation at Lowes.com, I'm sure Home Depot would be similarly priced) and a cheap exacto knife... You'll need to cut them down to size as well as cut little slits in them to match the vertical bars in the grill. Thus far I've only blocked the top half of my grill but the difference in the numbers Torque is showing me has already been very noticeable. Planning to block the bottom half early next week, when temps have warmed up a bit again and the thought of hanging out by my parking spot on my knees with foam pipe and a knife while the neighbors stare at me and try to figure out what the weird girl is doing to her Prius this time sounds a little less overwhelming...

From what I've read, as long as the high temps stay under 50, it's safe to keep both the top and bottom grills blocked. But if you really want to be safe, get some kind of device with which you can monitor the engine coolant temps too.

Also, check your tire pressure. The manufacturer recommendation is to put the front tires at 35 psi and the rear at 33 psi, but many nerdier owners prefer to over-inflate slightly to get a slight bump in mileage. The most common numbers I hear recommended on the forums are 42 psi front/40 psi rear. Personally I've chosen to go midway between that and the manufacturer recommendation and keep my front at 38 psi and my rear at 36. Your tire pressure won't have nearly as much of an effect as blocking up your grill will, but especially if you're currently a fair bit below the manufacturer recommendations, it may very well have a noticeable effect. And it is another thing that's affected by colder temperatures!

While I'm on it -- hypermiling is by no means necessary to achieve good mileage with a Prius in normal temperatures. But most Prius owners take an interest in hypermiling sooner or later simply because having that Consumption graph constantly in front of you makes it hard not to start thinking of driving your car as a video game and of the gas mileage as your score. In normal temps, without any hypermiling techniques and as long as your average trip isn't less than 5 minutes long, you should pretty consistently get into the upper 30's or low 40's.

Lastly, if you're in any way seriously concerned about possible mechanical problems with your Prius (and to be clear, none of what you've posted sounds to me like actual reason for concern), allow me to very very strongly recommend Atomic Auto on NE Sandy. The ridiculously smart guy who owns it, Travis Decker, is good friends with Carolyn Coquillette, who owns San Francisco's Luscious Garage, possibly the nation's leading independent Prius specialist. I think you'll find that by virtue of Atomic's association with her, the folks there have a much, much deeper technical understanding of these cars than even the folks at the actual Toyota dealerships, and that they can frequently get the more commonly needed bits of service done in smarter ways that will save you money.

 

Local advice is the best advice.

 

Small update -- temperatures unexpectedly briefly got into the low 40's this evening so I went ahead and put the foam insulation into my bottom grill as well. With the bottom grill blocked, a 2 mile drive to the Fred Meyer down the street got my ICE coolant up to 152F with the MFD showing 39F for the outside temperature. The car now feels, sounds and performs about as well as it did when I first got it in late August.

I stand by my recommendation.

 

Nice to meet you too! As much as I'd enjoy something more stylish, I gotta figure something that's actually intended to be used for heat insulation is just going to do a better job. Could always paint something creative on the outside of the foam, though, I suppose... But the nice thing about the pipe insulation is that you don't really notice it unless you're specifically looking for it.

I had the strangest experience taking Cynthia Jane (my car's name) to Broadway for a post purchase inspection (which happened a few days before I discovered Atomic, otherwise I'd have been at Atomic.) Even though I'd made it clear that I was there with a car I'd just bought, an older salesman who bore an eerie resemblance to Jack Lemmon's character from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross made a point of dragging me out of their warm waiting room out into the cold to look at Gen 3 Prii in the lot across 1st street. It was actually a bit creepy. I managed to resist the urge to yell something profanity laden about the leads being bad at him.

I did end up going there again a few weeks later when I noticed their website has a printable coupon for windshield wiper inserts at $4.95/each, which is apparently a savings of only a buck or two on the front wipers' inserts but something like half price for the rear wiper. I'm pretty sure my car's previous owner had literally never changed the rear wiper, it was super streaky.

Coupon's here if that's something yours needs as well - Service & Parts Specials

 

She's "driftwood pearl," which looks somewhere between beige and silver to me. And she had about 57k miles when I bought her used at Courtesy Ford, on NE 122nd and Halsey. They were very pushy and very clueless but I ended up getting everything I wanted, including to see the look on the service manager's face when I gave them back their Courtesy Ford license plate holders. I'm sporting a Luscious Garage holder on the front and an Atomic Auto holder on the back now.

Haven't really researched wipers at any length, to be honest with you. I moved up here from Southern California something like 6 years ago and actually having to think seriously about windshield wipers is still a bit new to me. Mostly just wanted to replace my super streaky rear wiper and $15 for a full set seemed cheap enough to not think too much about.

I did get a bit of an impression that the rear wiper may not have nicer aftermarket replacements available. But I'm sure the front ones do.

I'm attaching some photos showing how I did mine. Sorry for the horrid quality, I just snapped these now at a quarter to 1am and my parking spot isn't well lit so I had to rely on my phone's flash.

The foam insulation comes in 6 foot strips, I used one strip for the top grill and one for the bottom. For the top I just shoved half of a strip into each of the slots (actually slightly less than half a strip, I had a couple of inches left over from the strip I used for the top.) The bottom grill is made of flimsier plastic and after spending a few minutes trying to wedge an entire piece into the topmost slot I started feeling scared I'd break the grill, so I unfolded the foam pieces at their seam and used a 3 foot piece for every two slots of the grill.

It didn't really require craftiness.

 

Consumer Reports has done a full story on wiper blades. No need to listen to any BS.

 

Think of it this way -- from an engineering perspective, a big part of what a hybrid car does is that it captures a lot of the energy that a combustion only car would normally lose as heat, stores that energy in the high voltage traction battery and lets you put it to good use. Because some smaller amounts of heat are actually necessary for the car's proper operation, when heat becomes a particularly scarce resource, the car essentially reverts to behaving more like a combustion only car. 25 mpg city is pretty okay mileage for a combustion only car.

Sticking those foam pipes in your front grill helps it in its task of recapturing and/or keeping its heat so you can continue to enjoy that smoother, quieter, more efficient hybrid drive even in colder temperatures.

 

The grill opening has to be big enoigh to cool the car in death valley in summer. The air leaks in the grill block will handle 55 degrees and raining. If you have a water temp gauge, you may make it to June

 

How's your Consumption screen looking with the foam in place?

 

You have my absolute favorite color prius! It's gorgeous