Manually Charging my 2010 Prius to avoid running the engine on startup?

If you owned a plugin electric Prius you could have the option of driving around for a while before the engine started but it doesn't work that way with a regular Prius. The engine and electric motor work together for maximum MPG efficiency... If you use too much engine, or too much electric and not a balance of the the two your MPG gets worse.

 

Unfortunately, charging the pack would not stop the engine from starting when the car is turned on; it does that to warm up, as you noticed in the thread you mentioned. The engine will, as far as I know, turn on at startup no matter the state of charge of the battery. However, you could possibly prevent it starting by heating the coolant using a block heater, although I'm not sure how warm those get.

 

When I use our block heater for a couple of hours, in mild-or-better weather, ours will sometimes go into EV. Till I round the corner out of our cul-de-sac, and speed climbs above maybe 15 kmh.

In short: there's no advantage, no upside to forcing the car into EV.

 

Another reason for the initial engine warm up is to keep emissions low. The gas engine burns fuel most efficiently (both for mpg and emissions) once the engine reaches optimal operating temperature. You just have to live with the warm up.

 

No, unless you can achieve the entire trip without starting the gasoline engine. E.g. with an electric car, or plug-in hybrid with sufficient electric-only range, or an extremely short trip that is within your regular Prius's all-electric range, basically a few blocks at under 10 mph.

If you are going to use this engine at all during a trip, it needs to get warmed up, and this requires a certain amount of fuel. For the overall trip, there is no meaningful fuel savings to delaying warmup until you reach a faster speed zone, it still needs the same amount for this function.

You can reduce this warmup fuel need by pre-warming the engine with an electric block heater. But the electricity costs money too, and the block heater is unlikely to get the engine warm enough to boost the threshold EV-only speed above 9 mph to a more useful 25-ish mph.

 

My EV use is good for a "stealth departure". Just sayin'...

 

can you force charge a gen3 like gen2?

 

What does help when you charge the battery is that the first few minutes during the warmup you are driving electric. No power flow from the ICE to the wheels (when you don't really step on it). So for that it would have a positive effect if you could manually charge the battery to 80%.
But it won't prevent the engine from starting when it is cold.

 

Years of watching this and other hybrid boards have shown me there are distinct phases of hybrid ownership many folks go through:

First is the amazed/excited/happy phase to see the big FE numbers one has never encountered before.

Next is the confused/questioning stage from not understanding how it all works.

Then comes the research/education phase when one learns the tricks.

This leads to the implementation phase of said techniques.

The next phase is dependent on the individual: either you hit the big numbers and are content or you become frustrated; either because of the application of said techniques is too difficult (tons of threads on this) or you simply don't hit the big numbers you've seen others post.

The next phase is where I am now: turn off the consumption screens and just drive the damn car.

Good luck in your journey!

 

i think if you shut it down after it starts, it won't start again until you need it

 

The thing to remember about the Prius (and any other non-Plug-in hybrid) is that 100% of the electric power is directly or indirectly derived from running the ICE.
"But what about the power harnessed from re-gen braking," you say? That's re-claimed kinetic energy that originally was created by the ICE.
The ICE is the power source. The battery is a storage device. That's it... period. You can force the system to run in EV mode for a limited time under some limited conditions, and you can drive in a manner that minimizes the amount of time the ICE runs, but in doing so, you're not gaining any long term MPG advantage. All you're doing is depleting the battery charge, which will then need to be replenished. How will it be replenished? By running the ICE.
It's a closed system. There is no "free" energy.

 

Once that is realized it makes it much easier to "turn off the gauges and just drive it".

Then, after a bit...... one begins to understand why adding a larger battery and a plug to the closed system opens things up and make a lot of sense/cents.

 

The bar graph below shows the last 6 months of MPGs, mine gets driven a lot and ICE runs 95% of the time.