Buying salvage yard battery that has sat for a while

I'm considering buying a battery from a salvage yard as a replacement for my 2013. My only concern is: how bad is it for the battery to have sat for a while after the vehicle has been wrecked?

I'm assuming a lot of these have probably sat for a few months at least, post wreck, auction, etc. Is the battery going to be toast at this point?

Has anyone bought a salvage yard battery and lived to drive another day?

 

The thing is that a lot of salvage yard prices are crazy. Like $2000+ USD for a 6 year old battery. Are they not aware of the price of a new battery from Toyota? Also a lot of reconditioned batteries are ~ $1600 USD which to me is nuts because it could easily have ancient modules in it and probably won't last much more than a few years.

Considering maybe a bit over $2000 USD gets you a new Toyota battery that is practically certain to last 10 years, it's hard to justify the prices in the used/reconditioned market unless you really hunt around and find a gem for < $1000.

 

Yeah I've gotta keep scoping for a local deal like that. My battery isn't dead yet but I figure the writing is on the wall.

 

That's great to hear! DId you charge the battery at all before storing it? Maybe the fears about self discharge of the batteries during periods of non user are overblown, or at least any issues can be overcome by properly charging it.

So what did your forming charge and deep cycles consist of?

 

Thanks, I've found a cheapish battery that I might pull the trigger on. So you did 3 cycles of slow charging at 350ma and then discharging to 5.5v? For charging did you use delta peak termination or to a specific target voltage?

 

In my forum posts I found someone on reddit who said:

"So I own a hybrid repair facility and we get a lot of HV battery cores in our shop for one reason or another. I just want to mention that GreenBean uses Gen 1 Prius cells on their refurbished batteries. Yes, 2001-2003 leaky old cells are going into theses batteries and people are having multiple warranties per year. They’re not the only offenders. Dorman does the same thing. Both companies spend a lot of money upgrading the ecu’s and buss bars and also powder coating the outside of the battery case so it looks great while replacing the cells with garbage ones. I have pictures if anyone is interested."



Yikes

 

So Toyota won't take a 'reconditioned' pack as a core, even if it basically consists of all Toyota modules? I wonder why that is. Maybe they are primarily looking to reuse the case itself?