JDM: Replacing Hybrid Battery Questions

You have two options. If you plan on keeping this car for 10 years, you have no choice but to get a brand new hybrid battery replacement from the dealer. If you plan on keeping this car short term for 5 years or less, you can get a used reconditioned 28 module kit from Electron Automotive. Electron Automotive

Used batteries are only a temporary solution as they aren't going to last as long as brand new ones. Before you know it, you will be repeating the process all back over again. Batteries are planned obsolescence components.

 

The battery fan comes on when the battery fails, that's normal.

Your voltages seem way out of whack. In one reading you are getting 15.51v to 17.03v and one at 13v? Or is this over the course of driving it around and looking at the voltages?

If you want to put the least possible amount of money in, then you will be doing what we call "whack-a-mole" with the battery. Go on eBay and buy a comparable module for $30. Put it in and balance the pack and you should get 6 months out of it.

If you want to put in a new battery check out the link in my signature for $1600.

If you want to put in a new Toyota battery, then you're looking at $2600-$4500 depending on many factors.

I would stay away from rebuilt batteries. We have come to the point that there are only very few sources of modules good enough to be reconditioned into a pack. The rest are decades old.

 

You need a grid charger especially if you are doing all 28 modules at once with a wiring harness. Prolong sells them but it will set you back around 600 bucks. But again what you are doing is only a temporary solution as you will be doing it all back over again as its a real job. It only takes one battery module to knock the pack way out of balance before you know it your car comes to a hault as its not fault tolerance.

 

To correctly balance a pack, to get the 6 months out of it, yes it's a lot of work if you don't have the tools. If you don't do it, you're going to have a failure almost immediately. It's not difficult, just time consuming.

If this is a dealer printout, then yes it's while parked. And in that case, your battery is destroyed. You should be seeing tens of millivolts between balanced modules. Maybe 200mV to 400mV under heavy loads of with a severely degraded pack. Seeing a 4v difference between lowest and highest is basically the car has given up attempting to balance. You're going to need a lot more than 1 module, and you're going to need to balance the heck out of that pack. All for a couple more months of driving. Then you do it again...

 

One other option, if it's available in your area, would be a battery from a totaled Gen 3. They use the same cells, but different case and ECU. You'd need to transfer all the cells from the Gen 3 case to yours. Then you'd have a "not nearly as old" full set of cells. My wife's '07 has the cells from a '15. Once you get them transplanted, do a grid charge to make sure it's in as good a shape as possible.

While you're at it, check the battery's wiring harness. Chances are, it's pretty corroded. Batteries have been known to fail because of bad sensing wires misreporting voltages. They can be cleaned, but that's not as long term of a fix as a new harness.

 

You guys are killin me....The OP says he needs the car to last 6-12 months at the lowest cost possible. We're throwing multi-hundred dollar and thousand dollar options out there for him. Yeah, the voltage readings are whacked and we need some clarification on them or a posting showing the complete report to help us understand under what conditions they were taken. It COULD be that the 15.51 (and 13) values were at rest and the 17.03 is under a charging state.

OP: What is your timeline for having it fixed? Do you have an android phone? If not, can you get one cheap or borrow one? Do you have a basic understanding of mechanical and electrical? Get a Bluetooth wireless adapter for your OBD port and get a free app called Hybrid Assistant and Hybrid Reporter. You can then do a load test on your battery just by using your AC system to see which blocks are strong and which are weak under load. One block is made of 2 modules. Usually, it's only one module that is weak in the block. You should be able to figure out which one, if not, replace them both. If you're not able to do a load test, then start with Block 7. If the load test shows that most blocks are fairly equal with just one or two outliers, it is a simple thing to install one or a few replacement modules to get you going again and that could easily last a year or more. If the OP can do a load test and post the resulting graphs, they could easily have multiple modules, matched to their remaining modules, shipped to them for far less than 90 each.

PrettyPriusKiwi: read this thread

Just Another HV Battery Thread and Experiments | PriusChat

 

See the link in my signature on what I did when confronted with the same situation.