2001 toyota prius Inverter cooling pump fault

Finally, some good news to wake up to. Thank you so much, Brian. I kept waking up in the middle of the night trying to resolve this in my mind.

My 12 volt battery is dead since it’s been setting for a few weeks so I’ve been using my booster pac to get the car into IG ON mode. Since I’ve been doing this myself I haven’t been able to determine if there are the coveted “bubbles” as yet while cycling the pump but I will investigate today and move on to actually starting the car if everthing appears as it should.

 

You should be able to see the water agitating and rippling in the reservoir. If you can, you should be good to go. Throw your 12v battery on a charger, our cars are very sensitive to a weak 12v battery. It can cause all kinds of weird codes.

 

We have BUBBLES! So I went ahead and started the car for a few minutes to let more air out of the bleeder line until I could see no more. Then I shut it down and closed off the bleeder lines.

I put a charging unit on her to get the 12-volt battery back to life and will put her back on a trickle charge for the next few days while I continue to do other work.

I ordered these LASFIT LED 9003 replacement headlight bulbs from Amazon which should arrive tomorrow. I spoke to a technician at LASFIT in Ontario headquarters and he recommended the “black box” item since it seems the other box “sometimes shorts on the Prius.” I’m guessing the other bulb may not have a fan. It comes with a 1-year warranty and they welcome you to stop by their offices if you ever have a problem.

Since I’ve got one headlamp removed I figured it best to go ahead and replace with new LED bulbs as well. Upon further inspection it seems I may have to pull down the passenger bumper to gain access to the headlamps to do a bulb change. Yikes, not the other side too! Any suggestions, is it really necessary on the Gen 1?

Also posted is a photo of the old inverter pump and tool I used to cut it out. Pretty simple once I mustered the courage and was out of options refusing to go to a shop.

 

I did a pump yesterday. I've had the front end of my 02 apart, so it wasn't too difficult and removing the headlight was rather easy. Easier than I remembered.

Sandy you were right about those spring clamps being tough and nothing I suggested would have worked. Channel locks wouldn't have worked either. I apologize. I ended up using the widest jawed vicegrips I had. Piss on Toyota for those clamps! I dug a pair of regular worm drive hose clamps out and used those to reattach the hoses to the new pump. O'reilly's and Autozone both sell worm drive clamps that you can tighten with your fingers. Makes things a lot easier.

 

Weird, I had no problem removing my hoses with channel locks after I had the headlight out of the way. Brian, you need to make a thread with step by step directions on the easiest way to replace the brake accumulator pump!

 

The real trick with those clips is having channel locks/pliers that have a sufficiently wide jaw to get all three tabs at once. When struggling with such clips using pliers that could only get two out of the three tabs, I used a stationery binder clip (see image) and then used a pair of pliers over that. It was still a bit of an art, but got the job done eventually.

 

Shucks, that was last May or June. I hardly can remember what I did 2 days ago, much less 6 months ago. From what I've seen of you, you'll be able to figure it out. I do remember flushing all the old brake fluid out when I bled the brakes. I used one of these: Pneumatic Brake Fluid Bleeder