Hybrid Battery (P0A80): Replace few or all cells?

Before plunking down the cash to "rebuild" your battery, please take a few moments to review multiple threads here on Prius Chat regarding rebuilt batteries. The life of them typically seems to be 1-2 years versus a new High Voltage battery. For the price of the "service 2" up there, that's pretty close to getting a new OEM Toyota battery with an 8 year warranty.

 

Some people only get a few months from a company rebuilt battery. Some hobbyists like @TMR-JWAP spend much more time & testing and theirs last a little longer. IF you are the DIY type, @2k1Toaster kit of new cells for $1600 delivered basically gives you a new battery and you can sell off your non-failed modules to help lower the close. His link is in my signature and he recently verified he has some on claimed stock in his current shipment.

 

Was the 4500$ Toyota quote if you kept the core, Toyota is around 3000$ installed, try another dealer, or spend 2000$ “every year” for a rebuild.

 

assuming that your usa location is near north hollywood, california, you have many options, but only a few are valid.
how many years/miles do you intend to keep her? this will help us assist you in making a decision.

 

There are LOTS of threads here on exactly your problem. There are hoards of old Prius with the same problem. Do some more searches.
3 basic options:
1. Go cheap, hope, and likely get disappointed.
2. Go moderate, probably have better results, and maybe get a couple years out of it.
3. Go new/expensive and have a battery that will last awhile.
Note - the new quote you got was stupidly high.

You might want to read this whole thread. Why are remanufactured batteries so bad? | PriusChat
Another to review:
Hybrid battery died a hair over 2 years after replacement | PriusChat

 

just replace a few weak cells & recondition the rest, that will get you a few more years of life out of her...

normally 3 - 4 will be in the 6 - 6.5v range, those are the weak ones

 

There are no regulated terms. So what one shop calls "repair" and another "rebalance", "recondition", "recharge", could be anything. But judging from their descriptions, I believe you are inferring properly. The cheap options is usually getting a couple (like 2 or 4) modules from a used donor and replacing the obviously failed blocks. Simple but actual complex to pull off.

The thing you need to keep in mind is that the Prius actually doesn't care what capacity the battery in the car is. At 100% capacity or 15% capacity it performs roughly the same and unless you're watching the screen counting the time to charge, it will just work. The magic comes from matching the individual battery modules. You want them all to charge and discharge similarly. The error codes appear when one or more cells don't match the rest of the pack.

Now what happens when you take your 24 or 26 old and original cells and introduce these foreign modules of unknown capacity or quality? Usually it's not good. If you take time and try to charge/discharge the NiMH a few times externally and then find a module from the supply stack that looks like a donor match, and use that one, that's where you start getting 6 months to a year, maybe more but not usually. And most of the time the on-site style repair they don't have time to do this. If the shop can dedicated a charger/discharger to just you, your pack will take about 24 hours to do. So 3-days of labour... This is not cheap, yet their price is cheap. So I would guess they do NOT do this.

Their second option is basically they do that selection process behind the scenes and you just get the result. They would ideally have mountains of batteries in their shop and would categorize them all. It is likely that out of say 1000 batteries, 28 of them have pretty similar characteristics to make a battery out of. And that's what they do. Then when they get back to your car, they replace your pack with the 28 individually selected modules and take all your modules back with them like a core to recondition and categorize and try to find them a home. This relies on the shop being technical enough to know what the heck they're doing, but also keep LOTS of batteries on-hand. Like $100k+ in "spare" batteries that just sit there. How else do you get enough of a sample set to select matching pairs?

Dorman was the only one that did this in a reasonable way. After-all, they are a giant corporation. Their reconditioned batteries were universally considered "good enough" for a long time. But as the worldwide supply has dwindled on usable used battery stocks and cores, their quality has plummeted. Their warranty slashed and their use of the warranty skyrocketing. I would have to think if Dorman, a giant multi-billion dollar company, can't get their hands on a good source of used modules, Joe the rebuilder down the road is also going to have a hard time.

There are still a select number of companies run by individuals that do a good job at this, but it is more of a passion project at this point and of course the prices are way higher than they used to be. For example if you get a rebuilt battery with battery modules from 2014 or 2015, that's great! But that's what everybody wants, so the demand is way higher than supply.

I know nothing about this specific company and as someone who is somewhat of a competitor, I won't comment on the trustworthiness of a company.

I would inject that you can get brand new aftermarket modules from me for $200 less than their used battery pack and you can get a brand new original Toyota battery (installed at a dealer only basically) for about the same price. Figure $1600 in parts and $600 for install at a dealership. A backyard mechanic should be able to do it for half that. My warranty doesn't care who installs it. Toyota gives the backyard mechanic 1 year, and their technicians 3 years.

 

Pretty much shows all you need to do, reconditioning can cost anywhere from $30 for just one cell or upwards of $300 for multiple cells. And then just a bunch of time discharging and recharging the traction battery...

 

What year and how many miles?

 

HV,

I don't want to seem like an nice person, but considering your difficulty in just figuring out how the modules are numbered, you really don't have enough experience with HV batteries to be making recommendations on what others should be doing with their HV batteries. Watching a youtube video doesn't make one an expert. You should be focusing on your own issues right now and hopefully gaining some experience and insight. We do not need the "blind" leading and providing advice to more of the "blind". That's how bad things happen.

 

What software were you using to read the voltage on your car?