Added integrated lumbar adjustment to Prius seats.

Well, I think the Prius is great except for the seats, they could use some better support. I would have gone with the Recaro's but at around $1,100 per seat that was not worth it, before that I'd give up on the car. So I decided to go with the inflatable lumbar system.

While I will admit it did help the seats by giving them more back support, it wasn't a total fix, but think it was enough to get me by. The install was pretty easy and quite suprised how well it went. It did take me a good amount of time, I really took my time on the first seat and took me about 2.5 hours, the second one took me about 1 hour.

My biggest issue was where to place the bladder in the seat, I still think I may end up moving them higher, but going to try it without taking the seat out again. Now that I have this installed, it really makes you realize how lacking of lumbar support they were!

A few tips, you will need alot of zip ties(or chicken bands) as my dad would call them. Medium to large would work best to replace all the rings that the material is fastened to the seat with. My cousin and I counted around 70 ish for both seats total.

The cover comes off very easy for the back of the seat, I would highly recommend to have two people to do the install. Once you remove the strectch material on the bottom, you can see where the front and back of the seat meet on the bottom, each side has a metal bar and they are connected with the rings, just clip the rings off, and replace with zip ties.

Another member gave me the suggestion to use a cordless drill battery to run the pump once you have it installed to try out the height and to make sure it works, great idea!!

I decided to tap into the power outlet in the center console, instead of running the wires up to the battery, 3 weeks or so now and no issues. Their are fuses in the line from the pumps so figured I was ok.

I also didn't do any soldering or cutting of wires, I used the quick connects for tapping the wires in the power outlet, very easy to do.

Ok, so before removing the seats, I unclipped all the plugs under the seat, I didn't disconnect the battery, I just didn't turn the car on while either seat was out so that I didn't create any errors for the airbags.

OH, I forgot to install the fuse in the first seat, don't forget those!


Pic #1

This is the underside with the pump already installed, you can see the tan pouch, that is where the motor is housed, very quiet. right above it in the pic you can see the grey cloth stretched out, under this is where hid all the extra wires.

Pic #2

So this is the pic with the lumbar bladder installed, you can see the plastic(white) which is fastened with the black zip ties. I just fastened it to the wire structure of the seat, then when you inflate it pushed the foam of the seat out.

Pic #3

On the left is the plug for the Aux input and the right you can see the 12v power outlet which i have unplugged in the pic. These wires as you know are in the front of the console, however when you lift it off, they actually don't run into the floor, they run along the middle of the console inside it to the rear and then all sorts of wires in the back, which makes it almost impossible to lift it off, so I gave up and just split the electrical tape to separate the wires in the front and tapped into the power at that point.

Pic #4

This green stretch cord is attached with that metal ring, I removed the ring so that I could run the inflator hose nicely from the back of the seat to the bottom to the motor. You can just attach it back using a zip tie.

I placed the switch on the side of the seat, it looks like a factory job when you are done with it.

Two notes:

Many thanks to darelldd and finman who helped me alot with answering questions to get this done. darelldd has a good website to checkout also, that has some information I didn't place on here.

http://evnut.com/

Almost forgot, here is where I got the system from.

http://www.pdaroadgear.com/heaters/heaters.asp

Cost me a total of $141.59 for both sides, shipping, and tax.

In my opinion it was worth it

If anyone has any questions feel free to hit me up.

 

I agree with you, I did a simple solution for that, helped a little bit for me. All I did was add one or two washers under the front floor bolts for the seats to raise up the seat a little bit. That was enough for me to at least help a little bit.

Some stated that it might be dangerous due to lost thread, however it isn't much so not going to worry about that.