Reconditioning Questions

So when one buys a pack from a rebuilder that's been balanced within three Delta and all those fancy buzzwords are used in the description etc. You're paying him to use his 30 to $50,000 worth of equipment to balance you up a decent setup hell I don't think $500 is too much to pay for all this we're talking about here yeah I don't have that kind of time. I could forcibly make that kind of time but I would be taking up stuff from things I really like to do and want to do to be charging and discharging batteries I don't think I can make my self do . And then if I get lucky and only have to do this every 12 or 13 years my goodness the cost doesn't even matter it's broken down to less than I want to count per day.

 

I don't care what your mah numbers say... If you want to get 18 solid months of like new NiMH performance you have to have at least 3 rounds of deep cycling.

 

With some exceptions, in general, people with legit equipment are eliminating bad modules that will fail in less than 3 years. People with cheap equipment are eliminating bad modules that will fail in less than a few months.

 

You must drive the h a l e out of that car because I can't hardly get mine to go below 47 even driving it too fast.

 

09 Gen2 rt at like 311K miles. I have 2 gen 3 267K and 297K

 

This not balancing. It is equalizing and is a waste of time. If your voltages are not equal, just use your charger to get them to the same voltage.

What are you cross-posting the same question in different threads?

 

I've had two HV battery assemblies in my garage for a couple years and am finally getting around to working on them, although I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm starting off with a cheap Amazon charger/discharger but am open to other suggestions. Hobby Fans B6 Mini Professional Balance Charger/Discharger with Power Supply for 1S-6S LiPo Lilon Life NiCd NiMh Pb RC Battery I've measured voltages on these two packs and gotten numbers from .1v to to 7.5v but haven't tried any discharge tests yet. The first pack had modules that have obviously been reconditioned and the best voltages were in the mid 6v range. The second pack is OEM and most voltages were 7.4 although several were around 3v. Is it reasonable for me to hope to build a single good HV battery out of this mess? I thought they would both be pretty much junk at this point. (Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to post this as a new thread.)

 

I have the imax b6ac charger the battery pack is out of the car and is dismantled down to the cells are in the compression clamps no hardware attached.. now could i get a step by step using the imax discharger/charger reconditioning each cell one by one but still clamped? once that is done and i pull my other 28 cell battery out off my other 2007 prius i would like to go threw all the cells and try to piece together a a battery with the best cell when i go to wanting to swap cells do i need to discharge each cell before i unclamp them so they don't swell?

 

These are modules. They contain 6 cells. The battery is made up of 28 modules or 168 cells. Cells are not accessible due to the sealed nature of the prismatic modules.

There is just too much information to be repeating the same old for every first-timer that comes along and there are plenty of threads on this subject in the various Gen 2 forums so search is your best bet here.


Click in the search box at the top of every forum page and then click on the "More... " button to get to the advanced search options Make sure you select Gen 2 forums and check the "Search child forums as well" box as well.


I would use iMax B6 and recondition as keywords. This should get a good selection of threads to look at.

Finally, this is not for the fainthearted and is a very time-consuming process, so I wish you well in your endeavors.

Good luck.

 

What dolj said x2.

Search "individual module replacement" for a massive (2500 post) thread on the subject.

There many ways to "refurbish" a battery pack. Hobby RC chargers vs "grid" chargers. Load testing. Number of cycles, charge maximum and discharge minimums. Etc.

One limit of cheap hobby chargers is most only discharge at 5 watts (around 0.7 amps on a 7.2V module). And many chargers are "single channel" - it can only do one module at a time.

So, I did my pack years ago. It took about 5-6 hours for one cycle on one module. I cycled each module 3-6 times. Times 28 modules in one pack, plus the 4 additional needed to replace "bad" modules. Plus load testing and time to let voltages "stabilize" (sit for several days to check for self-discharge problems)

I used 4 single channel chargers plus a high current discharger and the whole process took 5 weeks. (This was early covid time and "quad" chargers were not to be found). Total cost was around $400 and I got another 3 years and 50k out of that pack.

Not for the faint of heart, and I am not doing that again.

When I recently had a "hiccup" with that pack, I got a new one from Toyota.

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