Bad Prius Battery-Massachusetts

Bought my 2004 Prius from Acton Toyota. After 164,000 miles and very little maintenance I got the bad battery code on Thursday. Talked to Acton Toyota who told me it would be $3300 to replace the battery. I talked to a sales rep there who told me with the old battery the car was literally worthless (maybe $500 for a trade in). The car itself looks almost brand new. I decided to post it on EBAY to see if there were any takers. First I spent a couple of hours cleaning the car out. It looked so great after that I decided to research further options. I found Powell Smith's You Tube videos on how to replace a Prius battery. I watched the video's and decided that didn't look to hard (last time I used a socket wrench was probably building one of the kid's bicycles 15 years ago) . So far I have followed the video's step by step and now have the battery out of the car and have ordered a replacement from greentec auto for $1345. So far (excluding web research) I have invested 2 hours in actual work.

I was unable to find any local installers hence my decision to try it myself.

Some things I have learned so far:

1. The scanner from Actron (ANM-CP9575) for $97.97 (http://www.summitracing.com) works great and confirmed the dealer was telling me the truth about the bad battery. I have never used one of these before but it was totally idiot proof as far as using it. Just plug it into the OBD port in the car and turn the car on

2. Definitely go to the local auto parts store and buy the upholstery tool for $7 that is mentioned in the video. It would be a super pain to remove the panels without it and a snap with it.

3. I researched many sellers of batteries. The Greentec one with the 18 month warranty looked to me to be the best trade-off for price verses warranty. I will post further re my results with their shipping and actually getting the battery in

4. The battery is HEAVY (121 pounds) You will need help to get it out of the car

 

One early observation. There is a lot of talk that you will likely die for sure if you attempt to replace the battery pack by yourself by the high voltages. Yes you should be careful but if you remove the connection to the battery pack and have a volt ohm meter to confirm that was 100% successful it is hard to see what the risk would be. It is sort of like working with a tank of gasoline beside you. Yes you could hurt yourselt if you dropped a match into that gas can who in earth would do that?

 

All done!! Spent roughly 3.5 hours. Most challenging part was trying to get the plastic venting reinstalled since the battery was a little bent during shipment. Got very depressed since the car wouldn't start after I got everything back together. Doing research I thought the aux battery had failed since I had driven on it quite a ways when the main battery went bad. Tried to recharge it but didn't make any difference. Then I found a post by Seilerts that advised another intrepid soul to confirm they had replaced the safety switch correctly. I was pretty certain I had but couldn't remember if I had pushed it down to engage the safety interlock that apparently is in the switch. Turns out I hadn't had it started right up after that!!

 

After a week of driving I've concluded that the rebuilt battery has a newer ECU than my 2004. My wife's 2008 Prius does not run the engine nearly as much as my 2004 did before I swapped out the battery. Now they both stop and start at roughly the same points.. I know this was not the battery itself since we noticed the start up engine differences 6 years ago when we first got the 2008.