Prius battery cells

You cannot replace individual cells, only modules. If I were going to attempt that I would buy from the reputable Hybrid Automotive who tries to match the mileage of the rest of your pack. I would then use their reconditioning system to rejuvenate and maintain the old pack. The owner is a trusted member here and many have had good success with the Prolong rejuvenation system.

since you are in the US another better option is the kit of new cells for $1650 delivered from @2k1Toaster here. The link is in my signature. That basically gives you a new battery and you can sell any good used modules to reduce the cost.

 

Welcome to Prius Chat .

I purchased and used the Hybrid Automotive Prolong equipment with success and if keeping a high mileage Prius, this is equipment a DIYer will use.

Out here, we ended up sharing the setup, which helps reduce costs. You can also use the equipment to rebuild and rebalance a pack. We’ve done that several times .

To make a module replacement successful and avoid doing the same activity soon after you just did it is to balance the pack. The Prolong equipment makes that process easy and less time consuming .

 

success varies depending on things like, general condition of the car, how many miles, how old. Condition of the pack, how far off the weak module(s) are, how corroded the bus bars are, quality of replacement module(s), Type of charger used, quality of charger, how well the chargers internals measure cell capacity while discharging modules, how many mAh's modules accept from the charger, how well you can match module groups and how experienced a battery tech you are. Than there is, are you using techstream to locate weaker modules before you pull the pack, and probably other things too.

Wack a mole is real for many, but if you have all the above covered rebuilding a pack has a much better chance of success.
Or if you want to learn about the packs be prepared for the learning curve.

How long a rebuild or grid charge lasts also depends, and is one of the reasons why there's so much confusion and conflicting stories..

 

Juan,

The very first Prius I purchased was a blue 2005 with 235,235 miles on it. The owner had purchased the car for his daughter to use for college. She used it for a couple years and then it threw battery codes. Since he had been a DIY kind of guy his entire life, he and his son decided to just swap out one failed module. A straight up, one module swap using an ebay module. No other work on the battery, not even cleaning busbars. They did it, but they were never able to get the car to work again. He decided to just buy another car for his daughter. He needed money for the purchase, so I helped him out and bought the car for $2500. I had never even looked at a Prius before that. It took me 2 days to figure out that they had forgotten the third step of the safety switch interlock installation. I pushed the handle down and the car came to life. He had asked me to let him know what I found, so I did. He was happy to know it wasn't the actual rebuild that was the problem, because they were very careful while doing it. I drove that car for a year on that battery. It was so reliable, I decided to let my son use it when he started college, but I built a spare battery using 2013 modules. Once I had the spare built, I installed it, and I put the original battery in the garage, where it sat for almost a year. I bought another 2005 Prius (white, with ~280k miles) that had a failed original battery. We drove it home late at night to avoid traffic due to it being in limp mode. The next day, I took that old HV battery from the garage and installed it in the white 2005. The car fired right up and I drove it for over a year until an SUV decided it liked my lane better than I did and nudged me off the road and over a few curbs and a fence, totaling the car.

I would NOT consider this the norm for what happens when you do just a straight module swap, but it shows that it can be done, and it can be successful. It's luck of the draw, based on the condition of the other 27 modules, and how closely the replacement module matches the average capacity of those 27. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with someone giving it a try. It all depends on how much free time you have and your attitude toward DIY. The great thing is there are now good apps like Hybrid Assistant/Hybrid Reporter where you can test the HV battery using the A/C system to see what kind of shape the HV battery is in. Replace a module, do the test. It will graph all 14 block voltages and let you see how they all compare.

 

1) Suspect most people start out learning all this by replacing one module and hoping for the best. Depending on your car karma and health of the pack it could work, as explained in post above this one. But in general it's the most problematic least thorough way to repair.

2) If you're a mechanic running a reputable shop, you don't want a car you repaired coming back after a bunch of months or after a year needing more of the same kind of repair. It's a bad look. Also mechanics not trained in high voltage hybrid packs are easily scared and like to avoid sketchy things they don't know about so replacing the pack with brand new is the way to go for them. In general there's way too much close-mindedness and wastefullness at spending thousands to replace a whole pack at the first sign of trouble, especially on PriusChat. For every one person on PriusChat that has worked on packs and are familiar with the challenges, there's 10 people on here who have no direct experience working on battery packs, but will act as if they do and like a broken record give you all the reasons they learned as second-hand info for why it's a wast of time.

 

How much was the total cost you paid the auction house for that one? How much time did you get to examine it before buying it?