Prius sat for 2 years

saweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!!! 50% after 2 years is amazing.

 

Very cool that you got it running.

I would still recommend using a charger on the HV battery asap. Force charging depleted cells at the high current delivered by the vehicle is very hard on them and pushes the pack further out of balance. We see this frequently where a car sits for a long time then gets the red triangle after a few weeks to couple months. Better to charger and rebalance the cells now before they are damaged beyond what a simple charge session can correct.

 

i don't follow jeff. if the battery is half full after 2 years, how is that different from being half full at any other time?

 

This is extremely common on the Honda side, and we are seeing it more and more on the Toyota side as well. It is much harder on NiMh battery cells to be infrequently driven then to be driven 5-6 days a week. They start self discharging the second the car is powered off. We have many customers who are snow birds and let their cars sit for months each year or people that only drive the car a couple times a week that are on their second or third warranty pack. The only thing that stopped their battery replacements was regular use of our charger systems.

Odds are that all 168 cells in the OPs pack were not all evenly at 50% SOC (state of charge) when the car was powered on. Some cells were probably in that range, some a lot less, perhaps a few with a higher charge. Pushing 20A-50A (sometimes up to 90A) that the car delivers into an imbalanced pack will drive it out further of balance until eventually the car will detect the issue and a red triangle will result.

It's important to note: Sitting unused for long periods does not damage NiMh cells. Driving on them without charging after a period of non-use is what damages them. This is why a lot of junkyards are hesitant to sell packs from wrecked cars with any warranty, because the "failure rate" is so high for them. We have purchased many packs from salvage yards that have sat for years and after charging them they have worked great - just as good as the day the donor car was wrecked. There was even a 2000 Insight that sat in a barn (literally) for over 10 years. After a 36 hours soak charge, the hybrid battery fired up as if zero time had passed. The owner has several Insight hybrids and he reports the barn find car has his strongest hybrid battery by far. There is a thread on it, it's a great read

 

interesting, thanks!

 

fyi Toyota says use 87 octane gas and not to use 93. which is good cause 87 is cheaper. but you probably got a good car. enjoy!

 

Our current product design is for a maintenance charge every couple months. It's not good to charge the cells >100% on a daily basis. We can and have adjusted the units down so that they can be used nightly as a PHEV charger.

We have an 09-14 Insight charger system on our website now. Because of the large voltage difference between the Insight and Prius systems, you would not want to use a single charger on both vehicles. We offer a separate kit for each model.