Are battery cells interchangeable?

By any of them you like how do you know and trust any of these sellers these are just people with stuff that went bad in the Prius and now they're disassembling it all throwing it into boxes thinking they can make a recovery of their mishap I mean let's be reasonable here If all of a sudden you couldn't buy Duracell batteries at the store for your flashlight what kind of nonsense would we partake in the next day or after we discovered we couldn't buy decel flashlight batteries anymore A lot of this kind of nonsense unfortunately. So if you can find somebody that's into these workable batteries that doesn't like for a hobby they're interested in forwarding their knowledge to go on to do I don't even know what but that's what my battery guy is He's a young guy he's into all this stuff gaming and segways and battery operated everything and all of that kind of thing fantasizes about this kind of stuff you know what I mean I don't have time for all that but he does really good work and he's built them a pretty cool setup. There are people like this all across the country bored millwrights who have nothing to do when they're not at work No wife to harang them to death about the disposal that sort of thing they're out there you just have to find them.

 

yes, you can even use gen 3 and 4 (nimh) but if you can find new modules, you would be better off.

 

So, the high voltage battery pack on a Gen2 (and most Gen3 and some Gen4) Prius is made up of 14 blocks connected in series. The battery ecu monitors the voltage of each block.

A block is two modules (also in series). So 28 modules in the entire pack.

Each sealed module is 6 x 1.2V NiMh cells, for 7.2V nominal. 7.2V times 28 modules is 201.6V total, but actual voltage can go over 215V. All the modules in a pack are "the same" (interchangeable).

"Just" replacing failed modules on an old pack can work - you can find used or "refurbished" ones all over the web. The problem is that most of the time, the replacement modules have different effective capacity or state of charge. That means that the voltage under load as measured by the battery ecu is too different from other blocks - so the ecu sets codes.

Battery modules degrade with time and use. Up to a point that's not much of a problem so long as they degrade evenly. They will still perform evenly. Get some "other" modules and you have a very small chance that they will be close enough to not have problems.

There's many days of reading in the posts here about module replacement.

The only source for genuine new modules is to buy a full set from Toyota.



Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I still don't really understand why somebody at home or at an electronic shop or wherever the hell they are and they can get parts can't just build a 211 volt based battery would say I don't know 8,000 mAh we're double what the Toyota battery is I don't mind if it's a little taller I'll work all that out after they hand me the 140 lb pack versus the 80 I took out doesn't seem like it would be that huge of an undertaking I don't necessarily need it to be lithium necessarily but something but I guess there's something that I don't know electrically that's just fine I know other individuals have built batteries and done some different things like the guy has in the car in Maryland that can be plugged up and charged which that's not my end game here because I think the generation 2 would be limited in speed and all of that stuff no matter how much you plug the inner charged it and that's not really what I'm looking for to drive off battery per se. Just a little more MAH I guess. But I guess it really doesn't matter in central Carolina we're not taxing the cars here and we're not mountain traveling or any of that stuff trying to break record speeds or anything so it's all good like the advertising and reviews have said for the last 20 years the Prius is a low power alternative that does everything very very well and that's that road and track car and driver all of them I've said the same thing basically.