AC draining Hybrid battery

The battery draining while driving in the city with the A/C on seems like normal behavior to me. Others have also remarked on how quickly the battery drains with the A/C unit battling the heat of the summer. That is my experience.

 

as long as you don't get the red triangle of death don't worry about it.. ac is the biggest draw on the system, try raising the temp a few so the ac doesn't run constantly

 

you have an old car with a lot of miles. installing and using ev mode is stressing your battery and will cause premature failure.

 

What battery? 12V or Hybrid (hi-voltage)? If the latter, from whom was it purchased from?

 

the compressor may be on it's

 

OK. Costs wise, odds are it's an aftermarket rebuilt with old modules battery.

Anyway, your original post is very vague. How long did it take to travel 3 blocks? That's like 30 secs around here! In heavy traffic in dense urban zone, that can take 15 minutes sometimes. Has the issue repeated since?

 

Your battery is getting up there in years, but I've seen it many times on our Gen 2 Prii, even my wife's '07 that has battery cells from a 2015. It is alarming, but can happen in a hurry because the battery is trying to cool a screaming hot car and is also hot itself; plus it's helping the engine until the engine gets up to normal operating temperature.

 

If the car will drive a couple miles in EV mode, but QUICKLY drains the battery with the AC on, I suspect your thinking is correct.

 

Just recently I noticed on my scan gauge that the a/c was drawing about 10 amps trying to cool the car down. That would be enough to drain the battery in about 5 or so minutes.

As the car cooled off the a/c drew less and less current, down to about 3 amps.

If you can buy or borrow a scan gauge, you can see if the compressor is drawing significantly more than mine, which I assume is working normally.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

As ...67 suggests, the AC compressor is variable speed, electrically driven and while bolted to the engine, not driven by it in any way. As AC loads reduce, current should as well, because it will not need as much volume pumped thru the system to maintain temperature. The lower the volume, the lower the head pressure, the more infrequent the condenser fans will operate as well.

 

Your new hybrid battery is not so new. It's not holding a charge very well.

Not sure what you paid for the car but a new factory Toyota hybrid battery is close to $4000 all in. Substract that cost from what you paid and see how that math works out.

So.....what you probably have is a whack a mole battery put together by whackamole industries.
Original owner battery went bad. And he had it "rebuilt" by WAM and sold it. WAM industries replacing a few battery modules to get it running again and do nothing about all the corroded interconnect in the battery. Now your noticing it does not hold a charge very well. Soon it will throw a red triangle. We see this here non stop.

Get yourself ready for the inevitable and buy a mini vci on amazon and a cheap xp laptop on Craigslist.
That way when the car throws dashboard alerts because the hybrid battery has failed you will be able to decipher all the codes.

 

Everything seems fine to me. I live in AZ, and when temps get into the 110* range, the AC will drain the HV battery from green to purple in less than 10 minutes easy (most of the time it's a matter of 2-4 minutes).

The health of your battery is not in question. Drive on without worry.

 

This is too the OP.

What your seeing is the first sign of a tired hybrid battery. Mileage is poor and lack of power starts to begin. It will last a while like that and eventually throw a master caution alarm when one module starts to not be able to hold a charge.

My car is a really good bench test of a G2 and all its foibles. I bought it new 10 years ago and take good care of it.
It has 110,000 miles and started to exhibit exactly what your seeing last year.

I purchased a battery charger from hybridautomotive and periodic charges and balances definitely helped but what really woke it up was a full discharge and balance. Although I did not do my discharge exactly as instructed it still really helped. It no longer goes into purple bar at the drop of a hat and my power and mileage is restored. It's been a few months and very satisfied with it.

There's hundreds of conversations about this system. It works. I highly recommend it.your battery has not thrown any codes yet. When it does it's too late most do not recover without module replacement.

Good luck

 

Yep...its getting tired. Mine was doing the same thing.

Buy a hybrid battery charger/discharger from hybrid automotive and do a full discharge/charge/balance and it will really help..

 

What @edthefox5 said! It will most likely add a lot of life to your tired battery. Best done before it throws a code.