So, I got my EBH yesterday. I don't have ramps, and I live in an apartment complex. I do have my own garage - and I plan on installing in my garage, but I thought, "hey, if I had lifts this would be easy! I wonder how much the dealership would charge? Couldn't take more than 30 minutes..." So I call the dealership and after "Pedro" couldn't help me, Earl comes on the line. He knows what an EBH is, but has never done an install. So long story semi-short, I point him to PC.com and he prints out the install guide that we have wiki'd. He says he'll show his guys and call me back. Calls back. The cost? $250!!!!! I said WHAT? "I showed my tech and he said it'd take a while, probably close to 4 hours". I laughed... hard. Then he goes on to explain that the Prius has a heater coolant resevoir that will hold heated coolant for 3 days, and that I shouldn't worry about it freezing. I then told him once again, I'm not worried about my coolant, I'm trying to elimi stage one of the warm up cycle where the most fuel is burned. He at least pretended to get it at that point. I figured they'd charge like $50 and it'd be a wash for the purchase of ramps (which I'll NEVER use again - seriously), but $250? Just thought I'd share this story.
Interesting. I just was attempting to install my EBH today. I got my car raised up, got underneath, but could not locate the hole. I don't know if I'm making it too hard or what. So, I called my dealership, the didn't have info on it either, but said come by and they'd give me an estimate. I thought the same as you, that it would be one hour labor. I haven't been there yet, but like you, I'm not going to pay over $50.
In other words, they didn't know how to do it and didn't want to learn. My dealer's service dept didn't even know you COULD put an EBH in a Prius. It would take well less than an hour with the car on a lift. The time to get it up on ramps/jacks and be sure you aren't going to get squashed plus the awkwardness of reaching up into the engine compartment while laying under the car is somewhat significant. Yes, you spend some time feeling around to make sure you know the angles and 'terrain' before you goop the heater up but once you have that it slides in pretty easily. Make sure you have memorized (spatially and by touch) the orientation of the plug (it is a right angle, use the cord as reference) to the pins on the heater (the clip on the heater will be facing the rear of the car if I recall) BEFORE you put the heater in. There is NO WAY you can put the cord on first and there is little room to guess out the orientation when making the connection.
Buy the ramps...you may use them again..there's a lot of satisfaction in doing your own oil changes...plus you never know when the cute blonde next door needs help with her car and you and your ramps charge in to the rescue! Ok, more realisticly it'll be the nerd on the 2nd floor who buys a Prius and you talk into getting an EBH and then you end up doing it for him...but that's almost as good as helping the cute blonde...right?!
Dealerships usually have time allocations for various jobs. I'm not surprised at the cost of installation. When I wanted my shocks/springs installed, the dealership quoted $750 just for the labor. It was one of the many standard jobs they had stored in their computer. Comparatively, a performance shop installed my suspension for $200.
True - I get that, but Earl flat out told me they had never done one, and asked ME for directions. He printed out the guide from priuschat.com and took THAT to the tech. So I'm pretty sure this wasn't something they had "blocked out".
We had ours done at the Dealership as well and I took the instructions from priuschat.com along with me and good thing I did because they had NO Clue how to install it! They charged us $70 for the install, and the tech guy asked me afterwards where I'd gotten the instructions from and said they were great and really helped them! So probably would have been alot higher if I didn't have those along to help them "know" what to do!!
A dealership that claims to have looked at the MANY install guides that are on the net by now, and got the idea that they'd have to mess with engine coolant in the process, isn't worth dealing with. Duh. It's not like that big-nice person HOLE looks anything like a freeze plug. . _H*
Hobbit - thanks to your write up, I was finally able to get my EBH installed. One dealership quoted me $250. Called another, they quote $500, and I laughed and then explained it was a Toyota part. He was very nice and said, "Oh, well let me investigate further"... Long story short, they quoted me $125 - 1.5 hours of install time was the block that was allotted. At least the 2nd guy was nice enough to figure it out.
