GOT HYBRID BATTERY QUESTIONS? ASK AWAY

While this drawing is my standard wiring configuration for discharging/reconditioning of modules, I've not learned enough about taking ammeter measurements, so I'll learn more and try it out... Thanks!!!

Main issue with using light bulbs is there resistance changes based on temperature. At high temps there's lots of resistance and at low temps there's hardly any. This has proven to be an advantage when falling asleep while discharging though... As someone who has over-discharged with light bulbs accidentally a few times, I can attest that reversing polarity and ruining a battery is not a very easy thing to do. I used to worry about that so much...

 

many rc charger computers will cycle D/C or C/D .. at the number of amps you want for each
and the time you want at (on mine) 10 min intervals, then a 'waste time' (0 , 1 ,2 min. etc) between the D/C .
at the end of the cycling, it will report the ma sent/received on each cycle for each C and D.
which is a faster way than the charge, light bulb, ammeter / voltmeter .. ?

 

Actually most hobby chargers only have 10w resistors for discharging, which is very, very slow... Some of the more expensive chargers have 20w resistors, but using cheap $2 halogen bulbs I can discharge much faster. I use a 50w and 20w at first and then back it off to 50w, then just 20w, then and only then do the 10w resistors in the discharger work quickly... What I also like about using bulbs is you can shine the lights on the wall and get a visual on how much charge the module still has, which is essential when you're monitoring the discharge of multiple modules over many hours...

And yes I realize that the science says the a 1/4 amp discharge for the whole discharge cycle is best and if I could afford a bank of 28 hobby chargers, I'd probably do it that way, but I can't and with only 5 hobby chargers and light bulbs it still takes about 20 hours to do 3 rounds of increasingly deeper discharges, so I'm not able to discharge the whole pack at 1/4 amp or lower unless the pack is in the car via the Prolong system, which doesn't help you identify the weakest modules, so I only do that when I already have plenty of data on the spread sheet about module health.

 

So you put alot of load at first , get the V /charge down, then reduce the load as the V drops until you finally just use the discharger at the lowest load - if nominal is 7.2V and prius bat mgmt keeps it in a optimal life margin, then what is a safe charge level to drop the modules to ? 20% would be about 1.4v down to 5.8v ... when cycling , do you go out of the safe margins of load that prius keeps them at ?

then there is overcharge, 20% above gives 8.6v and that seems high, but after the charge duration , after sitting time falls back to 7.x .

 

Hey guys, happy holidays!

I posted this on Lexus Club and in the Lexus section of PriusChat and not getting any luck. I read that posting in Toyota/Avalon might be better. I was hoping anyone here could help....

"I was just curious what your thoughts were on a captured reading of a 2013 ES300h i am interested in. Mechanically solid and came off lease. No leaks or funny business. But I'm not electrically competent. I don't know what i was doing at the moment since i was trying to sneak in this obd reading while at the dealership and i was not able to test the app on a hybrid before (my current car is non hybrid). These screenshots were during idle after a decent 20 min test drive. My mpg after some spirited sport mode driving was 33.1 mpg. Anything useful out of this?"

Thank you guys!

 

I could go on and on about this subject... These modules are incredibly durable and in the car I've seen brief peak loads as high as 150amps. Also to recondition and bring pack capacity back up from 50% to 96%, you have to go way beyond the charging and discharging threshold that happens in the car as this is the only way to break up the poor conducting crystallization that happens in Nickel-based batteries. How extreme that needs to be is up for debate. I've mostly gone with Prolong systems numbers which discharges to 5volt range, then 2-3volts, then third round down to 0.6v per module, which most people find shocking. But after that much discharge in a few minutes that module bounces back up to the 6volt range on it's own and the electrons redistribute... This redistribution I suspect is why you want to discharge at only 1/4 amp to be thorough...

Meanwhile, my buddy who has $30K in gear and teaches hybrid car repair at his local community college is able to create the same results by only discharging to 6 volts...

And then recently Prolong started having already weak modules fail with that depths of discharge, so they raised there discharge numbers by a volt or two each round.

In my experience, In the first year I was hyper viliglant about not overcharging or overdischarging... But inevitably as I've gotten more comfortable with the work on occassion I've fallen asleep while discharging and had modules on 0.00v for hours and modules overcharged so much they inflate the balloons I put over the vent tubes. So I've track these modules since those accidents and none of them have failed because of these episodes. And the packs that didn't have these accidents are not much different than the ones that did... Keeping cooling fans going strong is most important part when charging!

 

i got 3 good modules ready and now just to find sthe best one out of about anothr4 subpar prismatics ...
maybe i can do the cycling to restore one of the 'so-so' mods. to comparable of the 3 good .. then it's whack-a-mole time (well they are at the end of the pack ) so it wont be that bad ...

 

Do you have a spreadsheet of load test and self discharge test data we can look at?

 

u can see a module should draw 33mAh for .2A 10 min discharge
and receive 46 mAh for a .3A 10 charge (1 min intermission)

a .3A D should draw 49 mAh
.4A C should take 61mAh. (with 1 min between operations)

hopfelly at the end of the cycle the battery has a static charge somewhere around 7.2 V (or more)

the end of cycling should make also have a 'time period' before getting a V measurement - I haven't est. that yet, but an hour or 2 sounds reasonable for settling time.

 

Two months ago you joined and wrote,

And since then????

 

gonna slap these 4 in and keep my fingers crossed - getting seattle like weather here in the southeast which does hamper
things, at least it isnt snow , ice and wind !!!

 

I think this person was someone who learned to rebuild bad Prius battery packs and was working on a side hustle and was in search of customers to sell them to and in the first few hours of posting ended up with rebuilders with more experience than 'em asking their toughest questions, which I might add we still haven't found answers too and that was enough for OP to leave the thread with tail tucked between legs... On the bright side... This thread has taken on a life of its own.

 

, whack-a-moled them in and same crap (#12 block showing 12 v, block 1 and 2 showing sub 1v ..., ,- i know i charged discharged charged the hell out of these modules so .. it is either the cable, the voltage sense tabs , the computer, or the cable connector (these are pretty small guage wires carrying the voltage sense back to computer) ...
Who knows what the russian idiot with techstream programmed into my computer - well , i guess i was the idiot for paying the lying theif of a scoundrel-scammer,
this is when it would have been good to pull your neighbor, who maybe hangin around his own garage, over for a witness talk about what's going on when u have a nagging suspicion in the back of your head that you're getting ripped off ...

 

Look at the plug where the voltage sense wires go into the ECU... I've seen corrosion in that plug fry an ECU after slowly traveling up those wires from the corroded bus bars. Also a friend had a busted voltage sensor terminal I replaced once... The good news is those voltage sensing harnesses are one of the few parts Toyota dealers sell for a reasonable price of only $50 and it comes with the bus bars. It's called a Wire Frame and it might solve all your problems:

 

yes 1 quote from dealer was 79.99 for the 82165-47040
and much less for the rr G3830-47050

alt. source : 82165-47040 - Genuine Toyota WIRE, FRAME
Wire Frame No.2 - Toyota (82165-47040) | Toyota Parts

 

If you call around you're find one $49... Or just search engine on here... There's a dealership in Arizona mentioned on these threads that has that price. Shipping was also very reasonable to.

 

I've got a P0A80 fault on a Yaris hybrid in this thread:
2013 Yaris hybrid 1.5l 178k km P0A80 fault | PriusChat
but it seems to me the experts are mainly following the Prius threads, so excuse
this post, but would appreciate any help in further diagnosing.

 

you should be all set with jack the ripper

 

Any idea how long it takes the ecu to recalculate the ir values after they have been reset? (I should have known these ir's were too good to be true...)