Should I get a Prolong/Maxx Volts charger for my new OEM pack?

Your new battery pack won't need any help for 7 or 8 years... But getting that old pack charge and balanced and tested would be wise. Of course it's not worth losing the core deposit by keeping it. Unless you want to buy a Sodium-Ion pack for $1500 instead of OEM? Then you could keep the old pack to tinker with and I could loan you gear to do that.

There's a chance I'll be in Napa on the 11th if it could wait that long... Might be able to help you get a Sodium-Ion pack despite them currently being sold out at that time. Private message me if interested?

 

Buying a grid charger for a new OEM HV battery is a waste of money. It will not be needed for 7 to 10 years.

 

Curious what you paid here in Oregon for the new battery, mine is getting weaker and flagging codes almost daily though I'm still getting a calculated 51mpg.(did you have any issue buying direct from dealer i always thought they only sold to repair shops)

dont know if I can wait for the sold out sodium ion batteries much as I want to try them

SM-G960U ?

 

Oregon Washington State is the original poster Old mage? If not just forget this post A friend of mine from the Toyota mods list and old celica club.

 

I own one of these battery chargers along with the discharger instructions blah blah blah several hundred dollars and it's been used maybe twice so to be honest about it it was a poor investment for tooling for my Prius I would not do it again now I could build something like people have done here similar for whatever it is 150 bucks but at the time I was in more of a hurry and essentially had more money than sense so I would not do it again so you may want to think this over really carefully and I work on these cars own four of them and see them daily and if not needed to be charging the HV batteries at all and not because there's not anything wrong with them or anything it's just that all the charging and BS and around generally is not a thing. When your battery is bad it's bad All the people that play whack a mold and all these games with their batteries at some point wind up with another car maybe that doesn't have batteries like that or they wind up with a new hybrid battery like with your flashlight when the batteries go dead you don't spend hours playing with hobby chargers to have a flashlight working you go up to the CVS and you buy batteries so there's always things like that.

 

I've read that the quality of the prolong line as well as customer service has declined since Jeff sold the business a few years ago. I think there are some threads here about it, but there are many at insightcentral.net where Jeff has an account and has posted a lot in the past.
If attempting to use the insightcentral site, make sure you've got at least 4GB of ram in a computer or it will grind to a halt within a half hour or three of four different posted threads.
Maybe the new owners of Hybrid Automotive have fixed the quality and customer service issues they had as new owners, but you might want to research that before buying.
Prolong Battery Charger – Hybrid Automotive

Maxx Volts EL-1 Entry Level Charging System

Hybrid ReVolt Smart Grid Charger [HR-GC1] - $799.99 : HybridReVolt: Hybrid Battery Repair

 

I'm curious how Grants Pass, which will be around a 750 mile round trip, turned out to be the place to buy this since there are at least 25 or 50 other Toyota dealers in CA which are closer to Santa Rosa. Before Toyota broke their parts site, making price comparisons at the various dealers totally hit and mostly miss, the dealer in Salinas was often the lowest price on parts, including on packs (one time when I looked, quite a while ago.) Presumably the core is going back to a closer dealer, or is your better half game for doing the whole trip again later with the core?

 

There was a battery system that was made by some guy from I'm not sure where another country living here that turned the generation 2 into a plug-in hybrid if you will there's a guy in Maryland who's on this list that owns that car He pops in and out of here with head gasket problems and catalytic converter issues and things like that It's a generation 2 that has this guy's battery that I guess he made in marketed for a few minutes in the generation two hullabaloo. He might pop up in here in a minute and chime in but this guy has a charger and he plugs the car in and supposedly can drive it some kind of speed on EV power and so on and so on I really don't know that much about it he sent me a link to read about it sometime ago and I do look at it and I don't know where I put the link but it doesn't do anything spectacular so I'm at home with $211 volts and electric motors and all that you're not going to do a whole lot The Prius was made as a low voltage alternative that does everything extremely well That's what car people in the nose said about the Prius since it's inception and since it pretty much hit the road that was for the generation one and two generally