john1701a - Prius Prime Home Charging Cheat Sheet

Bought a 2018 Prius Prime about a week ago. I've charged it every day we've driven it. It has tripped the circuit breaker twice now so I'm hesitant to plug it back in until I've changed out the circuit breaker from 15amp to 20amp and I'd also like to switch out the standard receptacle to a GFCI receptacle. Anyone else have this issue come up? Is it feasible or recommendable to install 220v to my garage? Does Prime support 220v chargers?

 

Make sure your outlet wiring can handle it. There is a reason you beaker is tripping. I had that problem because other house hold outlets were sharing the same line. When I plugged it into my pool outlet, which is a dedicated line 20 amps. The extension cable is rated to handle 20 amps. I had no problem charging. Or it can be a bad circuit breaker. Best of luck.

 

In Canada, that is 240 volts. I could have a line installed for $1400, and get a governments grant of $1000. This hot line gives a full charge in 70 minutes

 

"It" as in the supplied CCID? Or as "it" in the Prius Prime itself? I ask because I have not actually gotten my hands on the Prime CCID as yet. Tnx. J

 

the prime charger (inside the car) supports L2 (240v) charging.

also, the oem evse will allow 240v simply by using a plug adapter at the wall end, plugged into a 240v outlet. there is a thread on this.

 

What you need is an electrician, while you haven't burned down the house.

The breaker trips before the wires melt, upping the breaker is asking to set fire to your house.
There are 20 Amp GFCI receptacles, yes.
Yes, you can find multiple threads here on PriusChat of fires, melted receptacles, and tripping breakers. Don't be one of them.
Any good electrician can answer the feasibility of adding 220 in your garage.
The Prime does support 16 Amp 220 volt EVSEs, yes.

GFCI Breaker keeps tripping | PriusChat

Charging keeps blowing circuit breaker | PriusChat

Prius Plug IN | PriusChat

Need advice - Outlet caught fire | PriusChat

and on and on...

 

John, love your "Cheat Sheet"! My garage had an existing 15A 120V circuit that only powered the lights and garage door opener, so initially I plugged the charger into an existing outlet- the Prime's charger cable is plenty long. I just added a new GFCI 15A outlet to provide local protection, but did use 12-gauge wire in case I later upgrade the garage electrical service.

Because I drive the 2020 Prime like I did with my old 2011 Prius, I'm getting about 37 miles on a charge now that AC season is over. Thanks for including some sample cost comparisons for different electric use scenarios.

 

I modified my garage plug about 15 years ago because my compressor was kicking out on start-up. I replaced the 15 amp fuses with 20 amp. Charging the Prime is not a problem. I preferr this over 240v charging. Slower is better, I think?

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I hope you check that the wires are sized for 20 amp and that you have a 20 amp outlet or there's likely to be a fire in your future. The Prime should charge fine on 15 amps. I do it almost every day at work.

Slower charging isn't better. It's just slower. Level 2 still takes about four times longer than putting the car in charge mode while driving. I do that every day at home. Sometimes twice a day. And going down a large mountain charges even faster than charge mode.

If L2 was going to hurt the battery, the car would not accept it. Toyota goes to extreme lengths to protect these batteries. That's how, at least in the US, they can offer a 150,000 mile, 10 year warranty.

 

Yes I had a ET friend check the wire size. Good point Jerry, thanks!

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Whew! Good to know. The car shouldn't be a problem, but something else could overload it. Better safe than sorry.

 

I agree that plugging in to L2 isn't harmful. But I disagree if you extrapolate that to mean that frequent extreme regen descents, habitual extreme use of Charge mode, not running AC in extreme heat to help battery cooling, etc. are perfectly fine because the car would stop you if you tried doing anything bad for it. I see no evidence that it keeps track of how hard you've pushed it how many times, or how recently, and adapts. It seems to just look at its current situation and apply a fixed algorithm. I feel pretty sure that if you push it as hard as it allows you to, all the time, that it would end quite poorly for the battery.

How they can offer the 10 year 150K battery warranty, is that it is required by law, regardless of whether they expect it to last that long. If they want to sell them in a CARB state, they have no choice but to provide exactly that amount of emissions warranty, and the big battery is considered part of the emissions system. By no means does it imply anything about Toyota's confidence about what percentage of Primes will make it to 150K without a battery warranty claim. It might just imply that they're willing to replace every last one of them for free if they have to, to keep owners of this flagship vehicle happy, and to gather valuable durability data to help them design future PHEVs and EVs, and to not get into nasty lawsuits if they failed to comply with legally mandatory emissions warranty coverage. I don't mind being their guinea pig, their canary in the coal mine for developing future technology, as long as they take good care of me if the battery dies.

It's not as if you can't destroy your battery by habitually driving in only EV mode or Charge mode 100% of the time, giving it a huge number of rapid charges and discharges compared to a normal driver. It's surprising how hard they do let you push it. Again, maybe they're just looking to gather data from the few people who even manage to figure out how to push the car. I'm very much into this car, but the manual is so thick, that even I have never finished reading it. It's on my nightstand now, I decided to finally force myself to read every word of it.

We already know for sure, that normal drivers routinely destroy regular Prius batteries at very different rates depending upon their individual driving conditions, climate, and driving style. One might get 6 years and 120K miles, another might get 10 years and 320K miles. And that's with EV turning off anytime you sneeze or the car reaches 42mph.. On the Prime, with 84mph EV driving plus Charge mode available to make driver-to-driver differences even more extreme, I'd say that totally relying upon the software to be fully protective of everyone's battery, is way too optimistic. I've seen zero evidence of the car preventing me from cycling the battery very fast and very hard anytime I want. Which I don't often do, but I absolutely know how to do. Just hop in the car, go 80mph until EV miles are gone, put it in Charge mode until at 80%, repeat. I've never heard of it stopping anyone from doing that indefinitely, though I guess it throws you out of EV mode if the battery overheats. But short of that, it seems to let you work the battery 10x or 20x as hard as normal use, if you wish, and I doubt that they designed it so that normal use only used 5-10% of its cycling ability by the time you've hit 150K. It will be interesting to see how long these batteries last, and whether the fix is to just reprogram the controls to draw less power from a half-dead battery, or whether they replace the battery and turn us loose with the same control software again.

I have absolutely no idea whether they've already done some software updates to change the battery protection algorithm or anything else, as I've not been to a Toyota dealer since purchasing the car 3 years ago this month. Nor do I intend to, unless something breaks.

 

I'm glad you can disagree with a nonsense hypothetical proposition. No one suggests any such thing.

They changed the 10 year, 150k mile warranty to nation wide in 2020, not just CARB states. So for most of the country is it not required, but they did it anyway, which loudly shouts about Toyota's confidence in their battery's ability to last at least that long. Some of that may have been motivated by sagging sales, but if they thought that a longer warranty was necessary to the survival of the Prius badge and the car couldn't support that warranty, they would have killed the car.

Yes, there is thermal protection. Any battery has a certain number of cycles in its chemistry and you can wear one our by excessive cycling, but you'd have to do that deliberately. As for what you describe, that's just flat abuse. It's like the neighbor kid years ago who used to wind up the engine on his '36 Chevy and pop the clutch to do wheelies. Until be broke a motor mount. But the Prius will keep you from overheating the battery, just not charging and discharging 24 hours a day. That's on the abuser/user.

Me too!! So far, I've only read of a couple PiP battery failures. One was under warranty, iirc.

 

I won't comment on the rest of your post, but this point is true. In no Prius ever should you not run the A/C if you are warm. The battery is in the passenger compartment for a reason, so the A/C protects you from overheating the battery. Do your part and use the A/C.

 

It’s also important to remember that the warranty only applies to total battery failure. Battery degradation is not covered and there are practices that can cause an accelerated rate of capacity loss.

 

???

 

If you are using an outside outlet, it should already be GFCI. Before doing all the swapping, check to see if anything is powered from that circuit breaker. It may be additional electrical supplies operating the same time you are charging that trips the breaker.