Gen 2 P0420 P0446 C1259 C1310 HV charging problem?

Greetings--

My name is Daniel. Although "I auto know", I don't, really. I just joined the chatgroup to appeal for some help and guidance, but I've benefitted many times over the years from the wonderful wisdom and expertise of this group. So thank you all for your help, past and present. I'm in metropolitan DC.

We have grown to love our '04 Gen 2 so much, we got another one! an '08. Turns out the oil burns oil, so we've been using the good ole '04, we got with 60,000 back in 2007 or so, and now has 250,000 on it. We have had so little trouble with it that we have not had to do much maintenance on it! (The '08 had about 150,000 on it when we got it a few years ago.) We use the car for food rescue work, taking food pushed off the shelves to local food banks, maybe 1,000 pounds a month.

A few years back we got a red triangle, and a local "doctor Prius" fellow, who actually was a medical doctor, told us that our traction battery was in pretty good shape. He had a laptop with Techstream on it. He's no longer available.

The Prius dealer then said "You have so many codes, it is time to trade it in!" H'mph!

We ran the other Prius for a while, and let the '04 sit. We had put some catalytic cleaner through it for the then P0420 code it was showing, and the red triangle went away, and never came back for a couple of years, maybe 30,000 miles. Nice! I had bought an aftermarket stainless steel cat for $35 which requires welding, but never put it in. My local mechanic said that I should have gotten the entire assembly, which would have all the angles just right.

Just this last month, my local mechanic, not a Prius expert, said that although the battery seemed OK to him (by codes), that he would change out the air/fuel ratio sensor ("upstream" sensor) which was giving us a P0031 code. I figured that that would rejuvenate it. But:

CURRENT CODES:
I have an Innova 3100 code reader. it is now giving me the following codes: P0420 (CAT), P0446 (EVAP), and for the ABS system, C1259 and C1310, both complaining about the traction battery charging problems.

P0420 P0446 C1259 C1310

CURRENT WARNING LIGHTS: Red Triangle, ABS light, and "check engine".

DRIVING SYMPTOMS:
1) last time I took it on the interstate, it would go for a while, then the green/yelow "battery charging/dischargin" arrows would suddenly go black, the motor would race, and if I would pull over and shut it off, they would immediately disappear. (Someone in the forum called this "limp mode", I believe.) Just driving down the street here, it repeated this behavior after a minute or two.

Mysteriously, the traction battery recharges without any green arrows. I am wondering whether there might be a fuse blown.

2) Last time on the interstate, the traction battery would cycle rapidly from full to empty within minutes, maybe 4 or 5 full swings in a 40 minute drive. I suspect that I'm going to need a new battery, and "Prius Camper" suggests the "project lithium" type, which appeals to me. But there seems to be some kind of charging issue, and as I said, recently the cells checked out OK on the tester my local mechanic has.

I'm in the process of getting Techstream, and a dongle to use on a "burner laptop". So I might be a while before responding. I have to get my Palpay working again, and I will consult TIS.

Thanks,
Daniel

 

Do you have his name and number, please? I've lost track of him. Is there a way to private message on this board?
-Daniel

 

OK, given my busy schedule, I finally got around to setting up a Win 10 64-bit laptop with the cheap knock-off XHorse OBD2 interface and Techstream "softwarez". I downloaded the Autokent 64-bit driver from mhhauto, and did not install it when Windows Defender showed up "RANSOMWARE" in it-- so a word to the wise. I did however find a way to take apart the 32-bit driver from XHorse, and got that working on 64-bit. Before I ran that trick, I installed a similar driver, which obviated one of the steps for the XHorse trick. Maybe I'll put up a post on that in detail.... Nevertheless, the 32-bit driver I got from the vendor had the Sality.AZ virus in it, so I am quarantining the warez to a single "burner" laptop.

But now I have the following new codes:
P3000 (the ONLY code coming from the HV ECU) P0A80 and P3014.
I am going to tear into the battery pack and inspect the bus bars. That seems to be a cheap $50 fix. And I'll look into cell #4 for the P3014 code. Will let you guys know.
====
I also had gone to the junk yard and got the HV ECU, the ECM and the Network Gateway ECU out of a wreck for which I paid $70 for all three. I pulled the HV ECU based on a 2017 diagnosis of the red triangle done by an unskilled friend who worked at a dealer, and he got among other codes, a P0A1D.

So I now wonder your opinion: should I change out the HV ECU? That code is not showing up, but maybe the unit is so old it is no longer throwing the code. Is that a possibility? Nevertheless, if it ain't broke don't fix it.....

Comments?

-thanks in advance; Daniel

 

See attached "offline" healthcheck.

And I DID read what Jack/Wrecit and others posted about CLEANING not Replacing bus bars. Does muriatic acid work as well as sulfuric acid? (HCl instead of H2SO4? and why not???) I have HCl in 4% or 28%.

 

Getting the HV battery out onto the bench wasn't too bad....4 hours, not 4 minutes, though. And sure enough, I have a "green" battery-- (meaning evidence of copper corrosion.... heh!) And there is lots of dust around for me to clean, so that wasn't such a bad guess. I'll spare you the pictures. Seems a dry powder fire extinguisher went off in the car last year... and the dust got sucked into the HV battery box.....

Oddly enough the software calls this a 2005. I've always thought it was a 2004. It has 28 cells to the battery. (!?)

I regret I didn't get a table of cell voltages when I had it in the car. But I don't know how to do that with Techstream.... Is there a manual for the software somewhere handy?

And I've got homework to do, on balancing cell voltages, etc. etc. Might as well since I have it out... the joys of retirement-- more "leisure" time to fill up....and fixed income budget....



AdChoices served up an ad for human trafficking? It reads
"Ukrainian Women Seeking Love

Meet Ukrainian Women Ready to Move Country for Relationships
<URL deleted>"

And a photo of a young gal..... Sad. Yes, right here on PriusChat! I have eliminated my advertising profile, too!

My dentist complains that Catholic Charities is involved in placing Ukrainian orphans, and he feels that this is pandering to human traffickers-- i.e., that they aren't vetting the matches they make well enough. Who knows..... I know a formerly Russian gal who is stuck in a bad marriage. Seems to me it is the same story. Her Russian Orthodoxy won't let her take the marriage vows lightly, so she suffers... toughing it out.

Sigh.... Daniel

 

So I found the manuals in the files section.
Techstream user manual ( 5 x .pdf files) | PriusChat

 

Thanks for the quick response, ChapmanF!

Does anyone know whether the HobbyKing/Turnigy charger is adequate for exercising the modules?
https://bit.ly/2RrSFu4

Do we have folks here who have actually done the pack repair?
Thanks in advance....

 

Thanks for the guidance, folks. When I got the reconditioned pack installed again, I did a "life expectancy test" with the Dr Prius App, and it disappointed me back in October by saying that I have only 6.4% life left! (Gee, all that work....) See file attached at very bottom. But it was accelerating well, better than before. I parked that Prius, and ran the other one for a while, and had another problem with THAT one, and am now back to using the one with the rebuilt pack. I took it down to the Outer Banks and back from near DC, and was delighted that the on-board display was showing a lot of green, a topped-up battery.

So today, I ran the life-expectancy test again. It took forever. I got to the end of the 900 minutes, and it wanted to keep going. So by the time I was done, it reported that the pack was in "new condition", and that I had what it thought was "103% life" remaining (!!). I didn't "share" the report before saving it, so I can't post it today...

[It said that for more than 20 seconds I did not keep the "needle in the green", so maybe the report was somewhat incorrect ( 103%??!).] Hey, I'll take it.

OK, so what did I do right?

Well, I read a post on priuschat,
https://priuschat.com/threads/how-i-recondition-cells.233861/#post-3260828
That I could go down almost to zero. So I started by discharging to 1.2v for the MODULE. That was supposed to break up crystals in the NiMH, which it apparently did very nicely.
That thread referenced BU-807: How to Restore Nickel-based Batteries - Battery University

I used the Hobby King 4 cell charger, but if you can't get the SkyRC BD250 Mr_Guy_Mann recommends, maybe the Tenergy T180
would be better than my Hobby King.
Tenergy T180 100W Balance charger with touch screen_metal housing

And I think I followed the YouTuber H-EV Tech for general method.

Somewhere in there, he talks about sequencing the pack modules, taking the greatest (discharge) capacity, and marrying it to the lowest discharge capacity in each block. That way, the total capacity of each block is roughly the same, and the blocks' capacities don't diverge too much. He was the one recommending the Tenergy T180, which discharges faster than the Hobby King did.

So with that I'll close this thread.
Daniel