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?
it is going to be toast at some point, but it is impossible to determine without testing. yes, many have had luck with low mile salvage that hasn't sat too long
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.
I just passed on a 6 month.old battery receipt in car from toyoda. For 600 no one wanted . I had no place for it . Car was beautiful . If the two driver side doors were with it I would have taken whole car. Beautiful . This was at LKQ. Durham NC
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.
I purchased a two year old battery (gen 4) from a wreck. Modules sat in the coolest area of my basement for almost a year. Finally, I put the pack to use, after doing a proper "forming charge", followed by two deep cycles. Zero issues...
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?
I did not charge the modules before storage. I merely checked the voltage of each module, and found them all to be the same. Recommended forming charge for nimh chemistry is 350 ma for 30 hours. Discharge to 5.5v per module.
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
Dorman's claim to fame is they upgrade Gen1 packs with Gen2 modules. I've gone through three Dorman Gen1 batteries, including a warranty replacement, and they all had Gen2 modules. That said, when I took the cover off the last one, the serial numbers varied greatly, no two were in series. I did end up buying a $500 OEM junk battery to get the $1,300 core deposit back when purchasing a new pack from Toyota, because the parts department wouldn't take the after market Dorman pack as a core.
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?
I believe Toyota will take back reconditioned packs with OEM modules, because the part dept. doesn't look that close at it, but not the after market remanufactured batteries that don't have the OEM case. The bright orange Dorman case was a dead giveaway it's not OEM.
The entire pack was done at once. ( 28 modules ) Discharge - 28 x 5.5v = 154v. Charge cutoff is time based = 30 hrs. Pack voltage appx 240v.
