Blown head gasket, should I swap engines or... ?

I skimmed through the one about swapping an engine, since if I do the work myself that's what I'll do. I agree, excellent work and makes me more inclined to have them do the work if I can swing it.

 

Yeah, that's the kind of details I wanted! It's good to hear that it's like most old cars I've had with many small issues and some big ones, but still your daily driver. That confirms my plans to sell it in another 5-ish years with around 200k, and hope to pass it on before the next big problem. If I do an engine swap, I'm not sure I need the rebuilt one from Hybrid Pit when the rest of it will get expensive long before the engine has problems.

Oh, I didn't know there's improvements to the EGR valve and ECU software - do you have a link or should I just search the forum? And why did you change the EGR cooler instead of cleaning it? It seemed relatively easy when I did it recently.

Thanks, I'll do that today. If I can drive the car there, it would be my cheapest and quickest option, and I would trust their work for as long as I want to keep the car.

I've been surprised at the prices others have paid for the same work on the brake booster, but there's only one Toyota dealer in the area, one branch is 30 minutes away, another is an hour away, the third is 1.5 hours away. I'd have to drive 3 hours to Eugene or Redding to the nearest non-Lithia dealership. And there's only one good local independent shop that I know of in town; there are several others in the area but none specialize in hybrids or even in Japanese cars, so I'm not inclined to spend a week shuttling the car around to pay for five estimates. This hasn't been a problem in the 10 years we've lived here since I do as much work as I can, and haven't yet needed major work like this.

Oh, I would have done that if I'd known! I read lots of threads here back when the brake booster failed, but didn't see that. Both the independent shop and the dealer quoted me the same amount and said the part has to be matched to the VIN and is only available directly from Toyota, so I thought I was over a barrel. Lesson: post here first!

 

Oh, I didn't know! Is that part of the standard warranty or a TSB? I was never planning to keep it past 20 years old, so that's one less shoe waiting to drop and one more reason not to sell it as is now.

 

I had the same experience Bisco described: over a period of a few months I noticed the buzzing sound when opening the driver's door after it was parked overnight went longer and longer, and noticed it happening more often while driving. There are a number of little electrical pumps and things that buzz on hybrid cars at different times and I'd never tried to understand what was what, until we got the CEL for the brake booster. It's the issue described in the TSB and covered for certain cars during certain time periods, ours was unfortunately almost a year past the expiration of the TSB so we had to pay out of pocket. Your 2014 may be at the very end of the coverage period now, but you can't claim the extended warranty pre-emptively: You need to have the specific CEL codes and it needs to be tested by the dealer. But apparently Hybrid Pit has rebuilt ones they'll sell you for only $600!

Good info, thanks. You're much closer than I am, but it's still only around 350 miles away and would be my cheapest and quickest option - I'll call them today!

 

Cool, thanks! Like @Mendel Leisk I'm wondering why they revised it and if it's worth chasing down, but Toyota's very unlikely to say. FWIW, when I did some EGR work a few months ago, I used one of the many PDFs that Mendel has linked in various threads, and tested the resistance between the several contacts it mentioned, mine were all very close to the 20ohms that it listed as the reference, so I didn't do further testing. I really wanted to pull off those impossible Phillips screws with my hammer-driven impact screwdriver to see how many springs would shoot parts across the garage and get lost, and/or figure out how much voltage to apply to which contacts so I could watch the valve open and shut. I had to remind myself I'm not doing a teardown for my engineering curiosity, and just want a working car!

Oh, of course. You got that pile from lots of previous work and can take the time to soak them clean so they're ready. I only had the one, so I used the day-plus of soaking parts to catch up on the rest of my life and came back to put things back together when it was clean.

Oh, I misunderstood, this makes more sense. You ship them your busted one, they recondition it and ship it back, and you (or the shop that pulled it) can put it back in. Still, I would have done that if I'd known - it's a pain to share our old gas-guzzling Honda Pilot, but not $4k of pain!

 

I talked to a guy at the Gasket Masters in Manteca CA today. I said " I have a 2013 Toyota Prius V, the wagon - " and he said "you've got a blown head gasket" before I could finish!

He said they do over a thousand of these every year, it usually takes 4-5 hours since they're super set up, $2150 total out the door. I wondered if driving it another 350 miles to get there would damage it. He asked several questions about the history of it knocking and the CEL on, I explained both times it happened, around two months and 4k miles apart, each time we drove it under 100 miles after it started knocking and then the CEL came on. He said not to worry about the time between when it wasn't knocking, even though the HG was still leaking (which I know because the coolant dropped slowly during that time) it wasn't causing any other problems until it started knocking again. I just have to be sure the coolant never gets low, and freeway driving without the stop-start won't make it worse.

That makes sense to me, since it's using a very small amount of coolant now, and the primary danger here is a bent rod when MG1 forces the engine to turn over with too much uncompressible liquid in a cylinder and bends a rod (unlike a traditional starter that couldn't turn the engine over), as they note on their website, and they measure piston height before putting it back together to verify the rods.

So, I came in here thinking I might spend around $2k to get a rebuilt engine (or less to get a used engine) and then lots of of my time doing the engine swap myself, and now I'm thinking this is my best option. Sure, it's still the same 11yo engine with 130k, but I only need to have a grounded expectation that it'll get me around 5 years and past 200k or so like I hope the rest of the car will, and that's what this looks like. It'll take most of two days for me to drive there and back, but I can swing that much easier than the $5670 my local independent shop quoted, or $2k plus around a week of my "spare time" working in my garage to swap an engine.

I can probably do this next week, but it may be ten days before my schedule allows. In that time, please pour some cold water on this idea if you have any! Bad experiences with Gasket Masters? HG replaced by a shop that failed again in less than 5 years? Money pit that keeps throwing these expensive problems at you? With Toyota in general and a shop like Gasket Masters in particular, I have to "trust but verify" and this forum is the only place I know to get straight answers from people who know - thanks!