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Gen 2 balancing charger question

Discussion in 'Gen 2 Prius Care, Maintenance and Troubleshooting' started by Vanilor, Oct 4, 2017.

  1. Vanilor

    Vanilor New Member

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    I'm in the market for a charger for balancing/reconditioning my 2005 prius' battery cells. I don't have a fortune to spend and I don't have a purpose for 4-5 battery chargers after I'm done. Will this work for the job and does it matter that it's a knock off of the official product? Do I need to do load testing or just run each battery through a charge/discharge cycle 3 times? I cannot find the supermate dc6 in stock anywhere.

    IMAX B6 Lipo NiMH Li-ion Ni-cd RC Battery Balance Digital Charger Discharger | eBay
     
  2. Moving Right Along

    Moving Right Along Senior Member

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    You linked to a charger & discharger for radio controlled (toy) car batteries. That's not nearly powerful enough to balance the hybrid battery in a Prius. If you can't afford the hundreds of dollars for a Prolong system or similar, you'd either need to figure out something yourself or borrow one from a friend.
     
  3. dolj

    dolj Senior Member

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    Those chargers are not grid chargers, but can be used at module level to charge individual modules, one at a time. That particular one is a 4 channel charger, which means you can do 4 modules at a time. It will do both charging and discharging and can be programmed to do 3 charge/discharge cycles, recording the last discharge to give a capacity figure. So somewhat useful. The big downside its that the battery needs to be removed from the car and disassembled and it is a very slow process to do a whole battery.
     
    Extreme and SFO like this.
  4. Vanilor

    Vanilor New Member

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    This comment was very helpful, thanks. I already have the battery removed and disassembled, planning to replace bad modules and balance all of the cells out. So that particular charger should work for individual cell charging/discharging?
     
  5. fotomoto

    fotomoto Senior Member

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    I've never used this method but my understanding is charging/discharging all 28 modules multiple times to balance the pack with only 1 of these RC toy chargers will take anywhere from weeks to a month. Can the car be down for that long?
     
  6. Vanilor

    Vanilor New Member

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    Yeah, it can be. And I can probably spend enough to get a few of them so I can do a few cells at a time.
     
  7. dolj

    dolj Senior Member

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    Yes, just slow like Foto said.

    Just a thought, to cycle the whole pack at once you will need 7x 4-channel chargers. For what that will cost you, you can buy a grid charger and discharger for the same cost. More likely you will opt for two or three 4-cahnnel chargers, as you have time at your disposal.

    Be aware of buying cheap knock offs, try and get the real McCoy.