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85000 miles and new battery?

Discussion in 'Gen 2 Prius Care, Maintenance and Troubleshooting' started by johnpriusowner, Apr 6, 2017.

  1. johnpriusowner

    johnpriusowner New Member

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    Just bought this Prius with 85000 miles on it 3 months ago. Now I get triangle of death and CEL saying I need a new battery. P0a80 and p3000 . From what I read this is uncommon. I however never have worked on hybrid vehicles and am not fully adept at diagnosing. Did try a search to no avail as well... I refuse to believe a vehicle with this low of mileage has a battery problem however the people I bought it from were exceedingly shady so the odometer could of been tampered with. Also of note before getting the code I went over a bump hard, parked, came back and dash light up ;like christmas. Could be something lose/disconnected just nee some direction. any help appreciated.
     
  2. JC91006

    JC91006 Senior Member

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    yes, it's completely possible that a 2006 Prius can have a failed battery, it's 11 years old.
     
  3. johnpriusowner

    johnpriusowner New Member

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    OK... My question was focused more to diagnostics and Repair rather than a blanketed statement such as replace the 3000$ battery. Any one have useful information on how to repair? Or at least can tell me what to look for on my scanner. I can see read outs on the systems but again not very familiar with hybrids. I can post pictures.
     
  4. 2k1Toaster

    2k1Toaster Brand New Prius Batteries

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    Low mileage is BAD for a Prius, it means it hasn't been used properly. Therefore the battery hasn't been balanced frequently and/or it sat unused for prolonged periods of time. All of that is bad for NiMH batteries. So a 2006 with 85K miles, very possible it is dead.

    To diagnose, hook up the Toyota Techstream. A generic scanner is completely useless. Then look at the HV Battery tab and it will show all the module voltages. You can see the deltas and see exactly which modules are bad if any.

    Then you have a few choices: You can either:

    1) Play whack-a-mole and replace a few modules at a time. Each time you should balance the pack and try to pick a cell or module pair that most closely resembles the rest of the pack. How do you that? Lots of charging and discharging to characterize your unique cells, and then somehow find replacement cells with similar measurements. It is not really feasible. That's why you just buy a random cell and stick it in, you are playing whack-a-mole where that may be good, but then others will go bad from the off balance. ~$10-$30 a cell.

    2) Or you can just replace all the cells. To answer my question above on how to pick matching cells, the answer is you have a crap-ton of them all measured and then just select 28 cells that are similar from your pile of thousands of cells. Since you only want to replace a few cells, it doesn't make any sense for you to have thousands of cells sitting around for you to choose from. This is where you can go online and purchase 28 balanced and matched cells from retailers on eBay. ~$1000.

    3) Replace the entire pack with a whole newsed pack from a junked car. You toss the dice because your newest replacement car is 2009 which is already approaching 8 years old. How long has that car sat in the junkyard? Was it used in Arizona or SoCal where the heat will just bake them? You don't know. Anything from $200 to $2500.

    4) Go to the dealer and pay $3500 for the dealer to buy a brand new pack from Toyota direct with a full warranty and install it just like OEM. This is the only option that the dealership will give you. It is the only option I would put in a car for someone who is non-technical or someone who you don't want to be randomly stranded at some random point in the future. So if your mother-in-law needs a battery, this is the only option.
     
  5. johnpriusowner

    johnpriusowner New Member

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    IMG_1182.JPG IMG_1183.JPG IMG_1186.JPG IMG_1182.JPG Well finally had time to look into it. I do have a bad cell. I have a maxi diag also which reads PIDs from Toyota pretty effectively and was able to confirm both bad internal resistance and out of wack charging discharging... pretty simple just looking for out of place numbers. Did it after I let the car sit for a while and also again once I started it up. Also car finally spit out more error codes p3014 which helps... I suspect the P3015 is influenced by the bad 4 block.

    This was the info I was looking for... As far as I can tell replacing the bad module is pretty simple... along with matching the voltage of the new cell. Any logical advice is always appreciated... hope this helps someone.

    Also most scanners do read Prius,s PIDs... your probably thinking of OBD2's which are useless