Do we really need the12 V Battery vent?

Reference please.
Without that it hardly qualifies as a fact.

 

I'm sure if that battery had a vent tube, all those nasty fumes from that crushed battery would have marched right down that little vent tube.

 

I assume fuzzy1 may have had this in mind; at least the number and descriptions of the deceased seem to match.

-Chap

 

Wow. I looked at the simple question and couldn't understand why it took 4 pages to answer it at first.
Then after reading the whole 4 pages through, I figured it out

My take on this (without spicing things up any further) is that AGM batteries really do not need a vent tube. As many others mentioned here, under normal circumstances, they do not vent. I have used many of them and I witnessed the moment when the venting actually occurred. It only happens under extended charging (when the voltage exceeds max allowable). I had them in my e-scooter/bike.Five of them were in series. During the charge (toward the end of it), some of them would exceed the max allowable voltage due to the voltage imbalance between packs. And this would cause venting. It would last like a second or so and you would hear it like a whistle. Because they had a safety valve that would vent under high pressure only. And to prevent this, I would balance the packs by charging them separately at low charge rate every 6 months.
There is no open vent hole on these units. Just a safety valve (not visible). They are designed to be placed on any orientation unlike regular lead-acid batteries which need to sit up right.

So venting should really not happen in Prius and if it does, the amount of H2 gasses that will be released will be so minimal that I really don't think it will cause any issue.
After all we don't sit in a air-tight vehicle. We have doors and windows and a hatch in the back. Hydrogen is the lightest element so it will move up and leave

I would use AGM battery without the vent hose on my Prius without even worrying for a second.

But this is me, everyone one is free to do whatever they feel is safe

 

From the report:
"This case is unprecedented," she said. "Despite the large numbers of lead acid batteries in use worldwide, no other fatalities of this type have been reported."

Also nothing in that report says if or how much the battery was damaged........or what kind of battery is was. It DID say that it was not OEM which likely means that they "cheaped out" and it was a conventional type with vented caps.

 

So the REAL question is...why would you put any other type battery in this vehicle than what it's designed for? You might change it once, maybe twice in it's life time. There are no design flaws or reliability issues...and the cost savings using a "cheaper" battery amounts to almost nothing in the end. This is not a Dually running 5th wheel with a light and trailer package...it's a Prius for Gods sake.

 

Because the real answer is that the battery Toyota(or some others) endorses as the special type of battery isn't actually a special type of battery. It is just a sealed lead-acid battery in a different form factor and with a fancy label. All lead acid batteries have the same chemistry and pretty much the voltage (12volt nominal if we are talking about a 6-cell pack). They will all work.
The reason why they make you believe that there is ONLY one type of battery that would work for your Prius is to get those extra dollars from you. Really there isn't any other reason.
You can go get a 12volt lead-acid lawn mover battery at $10-20 from a Wal-Mart store and it will work in your Prius. It may not work for 7-8 years but it will work for several years.
And for some people, it is just enough. They don't want to pay for dealer markup. There is really nothing wrong with that.
And if you want to go get the specialty battery and pay the top dollars, there is nothing wrong with that either. Both our Prii will run the same. I assure you

 

During the day today, the incident fuzzy1 referred to began to seem more familiar to me; I now think I must have read about it back when it happened, and then promptly forgotten all about it. (Maybe there was a weird election campaign going on that month, or something.)

The article does say the battery in the Cayenne was "not the original battery for the vehicle, nor the correct battery"; that much information we have, but anything more about what kind of battery it was falls in the realm of assumption. At least it does based on that article alone. Maybe somebody can find a followup article with more detail, or an NHTSA report on the incident, since the article said there would be an NHTSA investigation.

As this thread is more or less about selecting non-original batteries for the Prius, I guess I wouldn't be able to call the article completely off-topic. One thing it reminds me of is that I probably haven't had one single thought in my head about H₂S since the day I read the article the first time and forgot about it ... and that might have been the same for all of us, considering it was never mentioned in the four pages of this thread before fuzzy1 remembered the article.

I cannot claim any expertise concerning what conditions are needed for a battery to emit H₂S. I do understand that compound to be considerably meaner to people than straight H₂. (Not least because of that thing it does where in nonlethal concentrations it smells awful, but stronger, it knocks out smell first.)

Being reminded of that has reminded me of the way the world has of sometimes being more complex than the bits we are so sure we completely understand.

-Chap

 

Asked and answered 11 months ago. There is no need to re-litigate this issue.

Electrical problem, delayed ignition | Page 2 | PriusChat

Electrical problem, delayed ignition | PriusChat

 

Yes, yes...you could use a lawn tractor battery...but why? This turned into another silly mines longer thread.

 

Get real. How many hundreds of new threads do you think have appeared on here in the last 11 months ??
Expecting everybody to remember all of them is just foolish.

And......I still don't buy it. In normal operation, the gasses produced by a battery are hydrogen and oxygen and an teeny tiny amount of sulfuric acid fumes. Hydrogen sulfide is NOT on that list.....at least not in significant amounts. So.....what then could happen to cause it to produce some gas product that it normally does NOT produce ????

 

I'm not aware of any threads that debunked the 'fact' of that double fatality.

This isn't about normal operation, it is about malfunctions and and system faults and errors.

It is a well known problem in industrial settings, with no particular reason why it can't happen inside a passenger car too.

 

Once again.....only hinting at part of the story.

Under exactly WHAT conditions does that happen.......in ANY setting, with batteries that is.

 

A car filled with Hydrogen can explode with the slightest trigger, a cigarette, unlplugging your I phone
Always use caution.

The real problem is: How to fill up the passenger compartment with Hydrogen...........can someone
HELP.

I have even heard of a cloud falling on someone and he got all wet!

True , it’s constantly being charged to its healthy state, 12 - 14.5 Volts.

It’s actually so well known that Iv never heard of it, but you did give me something else to worry about.
Gee, Thanks.

Fuzzy people cause fuzzy thinking. Please quote all the incidences of ANY car filling with H1.

 

Can we just allow all these arguments to be? It all depends on what anyone wants to believe!
Let's not turn PC to a Facebook kinda ....

 

Totally agree with all aspects of this post.

 

To have the rights of passage of slapping a John Deere sticker on your Prius.

 

A very interesting write-up in Wiki. H2, the most abundant element in the universe.

 

I'd love to see that one on the left and right beaches.

 

So far, there is only one news report of battery-in-passenger-compartment fatalities that has ever crossed my path (different from saying only one that exists; I only know the one I've seen), and in 100% of all the one cases I know of, the trouble was H₂S, not H₂. So maybe focusing only on the properties of H₂ is a kind of tunnel vision.

I was careful to speak only for myself in #68 when I said "I cannot claim any expertise concerning what conditions are needed for a battery to emit H₂S."

On the other hand, I've got a strong hunch I'm not the only participant in the thread who could, in all honesty, say the same thing.

-Chap