Extreme Cold - Any Tips?

too late for a block heater?

worst comes to worst, you could leave it in ready

 

better for the battery than leaving it cold, but not a perfect solution.

you'd have to monitor temps, but there will be some charging and discharging of the battery, which will keep it warmer than not using it.

(i thought moreso was spanish)

 

-26F/-32C is still comparably warm as to what the vehicle was designed for... when new. When things are that cold, lead acid batteries freeze, plastics become brittle like glass, glass shows its thermal gradients, and metal does not like to give. In a Prius you are excellently equipped. The 12v battery can freeze and it will usually still start the car.

In general you should always carry cold weather gear in those conditions. It may seem silly 99% of the time, but driving in places like the Yukon Territories or even Southern Ontario the same rules apply. Bring what you will need assuming you run off a road into a ditch, the car is inoperable, and you see no people or help for a day or two. That means a blanket, some gloves, hats, winter coat(s), some granola bars, some bottled water, etc. Also bring things to help yourself not be stuck for a couple days such as tire chains, a small snow shovel, flares, etc. Bring stuff to help your car be rescued or to help another stranded vehicle such as jump start leads, some basic screw drivers, fuses, pliers, even a tow strap. This may sound really stupid when you're driving 2 miles down the road to the urban grocery store in a city of a couple million. But you really never know and with those temperatures, your car will be fine. The flesh bag driving it, won't fare so well if things go wrong.

It's still too warm to worry about things like your gas freezing or lots of the hydraulics freezing. A -32C day is pretty bog standard further North as the daytime high for a few months out of the year.

I'd recommend starting the car, then letting it idle with the heat set to low and coming out of the foot vents with the AC on. Let the car warm up until the engine shuts off. This gives the rest of the car time to warm up all the rubbers and plastics and heat soak in the interior. It also allows the glass to heat up slowly (foot vents on low) so that you don't crack it. Don't turn on the wipers until you've cleared them, or a bent arm may happen. Once you start driving take the first few miles more gingerly than normal. Your tires and suspension are still cold and cold soaked. The drive itself will warm them up, but that takes time and it is a gentle game to warm them up without causing damage. Remember you have an old car and tolerances aren't what they once were. Allow 15 minutes of "warmup". If you got to leave to 8am to get to work, get out there at 7:30am or at least 7:45am to start the car. In the US I am sure this is an invitation to thieves and many places outlaw "puffing" like this. But you don't have a block heater and this isn't a "normal" day, so hopefully the local fuzz will keep off your back. And would-be car thieves will hopefully be too cold.

No need to worry about the HV battery or anything like that.

 

nice combo

 

Its the Hybrid battery that turns over the engine not the 12v. It just runs the electronics. You need both.. but it's unlikely that the HV battery would get low enough to not start the car.
You can force the car to fully charge the HV battery by putting it in drive, foot on the brake hard and floor the gas pedal. It will run till the HV battery is fully charged the stop..
Let the car in ready mode for a while the gas engine may start and stop few times ... I think to cool off the motor generators... Eventually it will stop.. and shut the car off.
The 12v battery you can out a tender on it to keep it up.

If your really worried you could put in ready mode with the HVAC set to 65 or 75.. and just let the car start and stop as it needs to..

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Consider blocking the grill or radiator, then put some form of low power heater in or under the engine compartment. Even a heater fan, set to low fan speed and blowing under the engine compartment, may help.

When I was expecting -40F while traveling in Montana decades ago, I put cardboard in front of the radiator, an old blanket over the whole engine compartment (beneath the hood), and placed a common trouble light holder with 100W bulb very low in the engine compartment. In the morning (no wind), a thermometer inside the engine compartment was about 15F warmer than the outside air, a significant difference under these conditions. (A raw block heater was still available, but the shop was fully booked and unable to do any more installations.)

I was able to get an oil change elsewhere, and put in the lowest weight oil allowed in winter conditions per the owners manual, replacing the relatively heavy stuff my mechanic at the time had put in. This helped considerably, it was already reaching -20F on the heavier oil.

There are heated battery blankets/wraps available for 12V batteries, though I have never used one.

FWIW, actual morning temperature was -41F at the hotel, and -46F up at the ski hill where we had to return something. The engine coolant had turned to slush (I could hear it), and even with the manual transmission still in Neutral (all night), the car actually moved a bit from thick gear oil when I let the clutch out, after the engine was finally running smooth enough to not stall when letting out the clutch pedal. It was not at all a Happy Honda., but it did start and run.

 

Last Friday mine was parked outside overnight and started cold and -15°. I was remarking on how rapidly the engine fired compared to those of the conventional starting systems, and how nice it is to have a 200v motor to crank the engine. I like to think a Prius would start in conditions that would leave a conventional car needing a jump because of the way the electrical system is set up. The 12v battery just needs to make enough current to run the electronics, and the big traction battery handles the rest.

 

Huh, I thought it was an Oil Catch Can.

Fuzzy's got some good ideas: take advantage of the garage, introduce a few heat sources if possible, just to take the edge off.

 

iF YOU ARE CONCERNED . I would turn off all acc. Leave the heat on 65 and manually lock the doors.. It will only run very little and use very little gas. And it will be warmed up for your commute.

 

The 12V also needs to pump up the pressure in the power brake accumulator system, and this triggers when opening the door, before you have time to start the car.

Or at least it tries to. BTDT yesterday, after being away from home since New Years. It eventually succeeded, but took an extraordinarily long time, and sounded quite sick. My 12V had been weak for quite some time, and I had been frequently using a battery tender to help it along. I had even topped it off again just before this absence, and turned off SKS to improve its odds of survival.

It did succeed in waking up and starting. But based on the difficulty and even lower voltage than before the trip, it clearly was no longer sufficiently reliable to serve as my spouse's back-up car when I am away. (While she is inseparable from her daily-driver 1989 Integra, that old car really should have a back-up available now.)

Thus, as of this afternoon, my 2012's factory 12V is now retired, replaced with a fresh new one, built this month even.

 

Living in Minnesota meant parking the Prius in sub-zero temps outside while working. After those 9 to 10 hours, I started the car and drove away. Barely any time to warm up wasn't ever a problem. It worked fine. No big deal.

Keep in mind that an engine exerting a load will generate heat faster than just idling. So, driving slowly can be effective for heat.

 

You're definitely correct with that big mg1 turning over the engine they spent up pretty quickly without any issues and since it's high voltage doesn't really see much loss in the cold. The only negative and I sometimes worry about this even in warmer clients is that the engine is spinning and running very very quickly. And I wonder a little bit about oil circulation being adequate before the engine actually lights off. I'm sure Toyota thought of this and perhaps design the oil pump in such a way to help mitigate any dry engine start problems. I certainly wouldn't mind having an electric oil pump that would circulate oil before the engine actually starts turning. The other way to handle this was to put some kind of oil additive like Lucas or something similar that helps the oil cling to the parts after shutdown

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That's a good thought, I've wondered the same in the past. But I'm an evidence-based guy who likes data, in these cars have a relatively long history that we can learn from.

They've been sold worldwide, including Canada which suffers from worse winters than we do, for fifteen years. Even up there, these engines seem to never fail without permission, even with extremely high miles. On the other side I've never seen any evidence suggesting the oil additives do anything to help an engine. The display at the auto parts stores looks great, but does the engine really care?

 

Yep, I do the same thing. Idling an engine prolongs the time it's spends running cold, which I think is worse for it than driving reasonably immediately after a start. I was noticing these things have an extremely aggressive warm-up strategy at 15 below, and it definitely drove differently and maintained significantly higher RPMs until the engine temp came up. I'm sure this was programmed by people far smarter than I, so without any trouble codes I'm not worried about it at all.

 

Do Toyota USA dealerships not sell the block heater? You have to come here, smuggle them back?