Engine overworking with little Turtle Sign on the left

TURTLE typically means the battery-pack is experiencing an extreme temperature, either too hot or too cold. The result is reduced power. Your report of increased burden on the engine and waiting for a few minutes pretty much confirms that.

With such an old hybrid, first thing I would do is clean out all the venting and check the pack exterior. Odds are, there's build up of dust over all those years... making cooling more difficult.

Note for those reading this: The ORIGINAL model (never offered in the United States) used D-Cell battery packaging. The CLASSIC model that followed introduced the prismatic packaging, which was smaller and better dealt with usage heat.

 

well, it almost looks like your screen is broken. ok, here is what you should do. disconnect your negative terminal on your prius 12 volt battery in the trunk and then hold push the brake pedal for about a minute so it clears all codes then reconnect it and turn the car to on, not ready and see if the codes return. second go to your local auto parts store and pick up a scangauge 2(about $150). then email scangauge for a free cable to connect your scangauge to your prius so it wont give faulty brake and abs codes(it will still work with the cable they provide but give the false brake codes)). then search for what is called the xgauge definitions on priuschat for your year prius for the scangauge and enter them into your scangauge 2. mainly block voltage high, block voltage low, block number high, block number low and soc(state of charge). im almost certain your battery has a bad module in it.

Mine is a 2001 with 164k on it and I just had a bad module in it. I am mechanically inclined and was able to order 3 modules for about $60 and i repaired my battery about 4 days ago. so far so good. now lets hope it lasts past winter and then ill spend the $1700 for a new battery rebuilt with generation 3 modules. it is not over for your car and if your budget allows, this can be a less then $2000 fix.

stay away from the dealer, they are going to tell you bad hybrid battery $4000 for a new one.

 

meaning with the way its white with a black blotchy spot in the middle. makes it look like its broken.

 

do you by chance have a voltmeter? if so measure your voltage of your 12 volt battery. if that thing is bad, it could cause problems and false codes

 

Meanwhile, about that turtle light. It doesn't mean the battery needs recharging from the engine - if it did, it would be blinking on and off all the time in the constant give-and-take between engine and battery orchestrated by the computer.

What it means is that at the moment, the battery isn't capable of supplying or accepting charge at the usual expected rates, for various reasons not necessarily its overall state of charge. It will turtle if the battery is either too cold or too hot to function efficiently, if a cell or connection has developed high resistance, etc. At the age of your battery, no one would be surprised if several, or probably many, cells are ready to be put out of their misery.

But meanwhile, to keep it going as long as you can, try to resist the temptation to turn the car off when you see the turtle. Two things that can bring on the turtle light are an excessively cold or excessively hot battery. Your current temperatures in Auckland seem quite mild, nowhere near cold enough to cause a turtle from cold. On the other hand, battery aging effects tend to make it produce more heat, so doubtless your battery is running hot. The suction sound from the back is the battery's ventilation fan trying to cool it off.

If you pull over and turn the power off, you probably also stop the battery fan (you should be able to tell by listening), and the overheated battery just sits there and stews in its heat. You are probably better off to continue driving gently (which is all the turtle light is asking you to do), avoid any attempts at hard acceleration or braking, and use your air conditioner to bring as much cool air through the car as you can. Make sure it's not set to recirculate, put the fan on the highest setting, and condition the air as cool as you can stand, until (ideally) the turtle light goes out. Last month, height of summer here, I had to do that for a few minutes in some particularly mountainous driving in West Virginia. The air brought into the car by the air conditioner leaves the car through the battery, helping to keep its temperature under control. (The recirculate setting prevents that flow through the car, which is why you want to avoid 'recirculate' if the battery is hot. The NHW11 will automatically cancel the recirculate setting if it needs to for battery cooling, but I don't know whether that feature was in your NHW10.)

The sound of the engine working harder is to be expected: the computer is, by design, shifting the balance of work further onto the engine in order to go easy on the battery. The engine won't "overwork"; the computers know its capabilities and won't overtax it. It just won't sound like what you're used to (and, if you call for hard acceleration, you won't get much more power than what the engine by itself can provide).

All this is just to stretch things out a little longer ... chances are, your battery needs work.

-Chap

 

let us know how it goes. one thing are you comfortable with taking apart the hybrid battery?when i first got my prius, a month later i decided with no experience to take the cover off my battery and go in there to check for corrosion and clean the terminals. good thing i did because there was corrosion present, once i did that and all i used was terminal spray to protect my buss bars(after sanding them down a little to remove corrosion) and terminals it was a year ago that i did this and the car worked better. when i took mine apart to replace the bad cell a week ago, everything looked great, yours could be a case of corrosion and once clean, could function well. its not hard to do. just use common sense and take it slow.

 

theres a write up on this forum somewhere. i gotta remember

 

this is a link for a video to removing the battery. you do not need to remove the battery to for what you are going to do which is to check voltages across each cell or to take off the buss bars and clean the terminals. take off the vents like he explains in the video. you dont need to remove the breather tube. nor remove the wires. those ten millimeter bolts that are along the bottom of the battery. those all need to come out to get the cover off. plus there are a couple more on the sides and one or two on the top. make sure when you disconnect the main wires that those bolts with the round nubs on the ends, put those back in the holes so you dont lose them. and all other bolts put them in a jar so you dont lose those. oh and if you have broken glass shards. vacuum those out, i dont know why they didnt do that. i think that was the most annoying thing on this video.

 

also where the seat used to be, those bolts along the bottom gotta come out. and all youll do with your voltmeter is go across all 38 cells, positive to negative and look at the voltages, make sure your car has been sitting overnight. thats how i found my bad cell. all the rest were around 7.8volts and the one was at 6.9 volts. so there was my culprit.

 

im sure that a fine gentleman by the name of bob wilson will chime in. he helped me tremendously with getting my car back on the road. take his advice over mine if he tells you something different. he is an engineer and knows his stuff when it comes to these cars.