So i recently got home from driving about 10 miles from work to home. I wanted to do a reading my battery and this is what it gave me after sitting idle for about 2/3 minutes with AC on full blast. Does everything look okay ? Thanks for any help you can provide !
Nothing there that would worry me. As long as your battery bars continue to respond slowly and not change quickly, you're doing pretty well. If you were in California, you would be just out of warranty depending on when the car was originally sold.
Thanks very much for that info ! It does change sometimes and gets down to purple when it's been sitting for a day or so but it quickly goes back up to blue, near green once it's ran for a tad.
I'm not sure why leaving it sitting for a day or so should cause it to react any differently than normal. Do you mean it loses bars during the time you have it turned off? If that is the case, I think you may have a problem. How quickly does it go from purple to green? Rapid changes in State of Charge are not a good sign. I believe some people have the mistaken impression that green bars on the MFD mean that the battery has not lost much total capacity. That only means that it is nearing an 80% SOC of its total capacity at this particular time, a total capacity which may have been considerably reduced from the time it was new.
That is one of the signs that the battery is nearing the end of its useful life. I agree with what @davecook89t wrote. What seems to happen is that the battery has reduced capacity due to a combination of normal wear on the battery and a growing imbalance in the states of charge of the cells. Yours looks pretty well balanced, but the chemicals inside are still aging. When you get the purple bars after it sat for a while, I'd guess that you probably parked it with a fairly low state of charge, then (being in Iowa in the summer, which I know is even worse than Florida) you hit the AC and it runs like mad, pulling down the battery, and then you start driving which also drains the battery even more while the engine warms up. That's about as hard as a Prius battery can work. And your battery is getting to the point where they start to fail, but many go way way longer. The two best options that I see for you involve deciding how to prepare for what may happen a few months or maybe a year from now. It's hard to predict how long you have. Many people buy time for the battery by reconditioning it with a Prolong grid charger. But that is a sizable investment. The other viable alternative is to save up for a new battery and drive it till it fails. You never know. It might still last quite a while.
Thank you both for the very informative information on this ! It makes so much more sense that when the AC is running in the hot Iowa weather it would work the battery harder than normal. It's funny because recently it's been doing very well with staying up in the blue even after it sits for a day or two. I've noticed it only went down in the purple when I got the car from the lot ( possibly due to the unit not being driven for a few months or so ) Luckily I've ran all sorts of diagnostic tests using Torque pro and Carista APP using my Bluetooth ELM adapter and everything else has been smooth as glass. I've check the fan and etc. to make sure the battery is getting proper ventilation and I at some point will possibly tackle cleaning the battery's. I've noticed that it goes back into the blue fairly quickly when driving it and it will stay there for a good while even when it's been sitting idle recently. I even tried sitting idle ( with the picture above ) with the AC full blast for a good 3 minutes and that's the readings I've had. I haven't had any warning lights, dings or etc. show up on my dashboard but I am religiously checking on it every month or so to make sure I'm doing what I can to keep it in tip top shape.
I suggest you read up on the Prolong charger threads. It sounds like your car would benefit from one. If you're going to use one, now is the time rather than waiting for the battery to throw a code. Nothing to worry about yet, but preventative maintenance is usually a good thing.
I have another quick question if you could possibly help ( thank you for that prolong battery info, I have it in my checkout list to buy asap ) do you know of a good video that can show me how to properly clean the hybrid battery copper plates ? I know I can get some battery terminal cleaner that would work great on cleaning and adding a protective coating on the copper plates. Thanks a lot for all the help and awesome tips, I can't express my gratitude enough !
I have never worked on a Prius HV battery but have been an electrician and did you ever notice that when you buy a crimp style terminal no matter how big or small they are always plated to guard against corrosion. If it were me I would install all new plated hardware. You will need a proper torque wrench to do this.
We heated up a vinegar (5% acetic acid) and salt solution, placed the bus bars in the pot of solution and stirred for a couple of minutes. Then rinsed with tap water. They came out pretty clean
I do not know of one, but I haven't googled it. I won't repeat the suggestions given, but they are good. Seems like a good idea to me. Quicker than cleaning, too. This is more what I would try if I was broke. It works. However, @padroo mentioned crimp connectors and that reminded me that the wires often corrode inside the connectors. I lived for 10 years on the windward side of a small island. It was amazing how the corrosion could not only get into the connections in our whole electrical system, but the corrosion would work its way under the insulation along the whole length of the wire. So check for that if you do open up the battery case in the future. There are tiny little wires gong to sensors for voltage and temperature that are sometimes the actual cause of battery codes when the battery itself is OK.
It looks like Toyota used plated bus bars in the Gen 4 batteries by looking at the John Kelly videos from Weber University. Like Jerry mentioned about corroded wiring, usually high quality stranded wire is tinned for corrosion.
I assume the wires are multi-strand? If so I'd be concerned that hot vinegar-salt would work it's way up the wire under the insulation via capillary action. Both are corrosive to copper, especially the salt. I would omit salt. A simple rinse would not get rid of that. I'd would minimally give it a good soak in a weak sodium bicarbonate solution to neutralize the acid, then soak and rinse again in clear water.
Shame on Toyota for not using a more high quality bus bar on the earlier Prius. I always looked at Japanese electrical and electronics as being the best in the world. Looks like they saved a dime and now you spend dollars.
Toyota already has cars that regularly go 250k miles, if they made them more durable, they would be screwed. They have to break!
