Refurbished w/12 month, or New HV battery w/better warranty?

Hello,
There is an entire thread regarding what you want to do buried in Priuschat. Soon, many will respond to your questions. I suggest you read through them all and draw up your own conclusion. My opinion? I too am not interested in a DIY job when it comes to this (back, knees, joints, etc). But, I would suggest you seek out the responses that offer a "new" HV battery. There are so many new batteries and really good prices and depending on your location, is worth the cost. It will last much longer. It will not go out on you while you are on the way to the beautiful Grand Canyon. When it comes to car batteries, new is better, safer, will come with a better warranty and will be more reliable.

 

your car is barely broken in. if you plan on keeping it awhile, i would go with oem. refurbished are just so hit or miss, and no one here can tell you how long it will last.
call around to dealers, pricing is competitive

 

You're not even broke in good has been said already but the age and years and time sitting is here for sure It's hard to tell you what to do The people who can rebuild batteries properly have about 30-40,000 in equipment invested and know how to use it I've bought some batteries from a guy down here on the east coast that does really good work so far both have made two years with no events and then I just put a brand new battery in my '09 personal daily work vehicle I don't know about mid pandemic or something The battery knew from the Toyota dealer when all said and done in my trade-in was accepted out the door price of the battery only cash and carry was $1490 I think

 

Having just faced this issue, but from a patient curiosity (I have a fallback car), I would suggest the following..

1. In my area, I can buy a new Prius battery from the dealership (parts only) for $1600.
2. Pulling the battery out and replacing it entire is not too hard a job, the first time it took me an afternoon to pull the battery out with the help of some excellent youtube examples.
- The high voltage is a concern, but if you follow the Toyota instructions (safety plug, remove the two modules that are connected to the safety plug last, etc. you can do it safely.
- Taking the battery out allows you to inspect the bus bars for corrosion as well as the HV ECU for corrosion - I had corrosion in both places and I believe a corroded HV ECU could lead to battery damage. Replacing the bus bar connectors, cables (if needed) and ECU is cheap and easy in terms of parts and good preventative maintenance above and beyond the battery.

If I needed my car back fast, this is what I would have done - the dealer wanted about $4.5K to do this. mechanic's time billed out at $200/hr at a dealership in my area. $1600 for a dealer part plus a Saturday would have gotten me back on the road fastest.

There are so many folks in my area offering a cheap fix (renovation), I just don't trust them. If you look at the variable ways people restore battery modules, it's all over the map and might only be a short term fix. With a new Toyota battery, you have a little warranty to work with from a known brand.

That being said, since I had the time and curiosity to get to a repeatable process, for my first battery renovation, I figure I'm out about $600 in chargers and tools, I purchased s total of 10 new modules at about $30 per from two different vendors (ebay and a dedicated battery renewal shop), knowing I would probably kill a couple of cells in my experimenting. I had two bad cells for sure, so I might have been safe just getting 6, so if I had known what I was doing, about $180 in replacement modules.

So I'm out $800 to get a workable pack, but the issue is getting to a repeatable, fact based process and the time you want to spend.

Each battery cycle in my resultant process takes about 6 hours per cycle. A minimum cycle count was 2, the maximum cycle count was 5, so call it 3 cycles per module on average. My approach was not to just focus on the failed or obviously week modules, but recondition the entire set of modules since I was going to the trouble anyway. I used 2 quad chargers so I could process 8 modules at a time, 28 modules total, so 4 sets to process, 3x6 hours on average per set = 72 hours end to end. However, I found the most critical part of a cycle was the charging, requiring constant monitoring for 2 hours, so you can't go continuous without delay. Since I have to work for a living, 72 hours ended up being about 3 weeks. That's a lot of hours and if I didn't have a car, wouldn't have worked well for me.

All that to say, I'm glad I did what I did. Not counting my own time I saved about $3k in cash and now have the means to start refurbishing my next battery starting with a junkyard unit so I can swap out in a weekend should I need to in the future.

Summary (IMHO)
1. Best option for a quick solution is to buy a replacement battery from Toyota, watch some youtube (great references here in the Wiki sections) and do the battery swap yourself, entire.
2. Using someone else to refurbish - YMMV - how long have they been in business, is it a real business or a guy like me in a garage...
3. If you take the long view, or want to have a hobby buying cheap Gen 2 Prius' with bad batteries or keep a spare battery ready, getting the gear and learning about batteries might be worth it. (if you work from home, have a second car or cheap Uber, yada yada yada).

I'm gonna post my experience here and elsewhere, as there is a lot of FUD out there, especially from some of those trying to sell something, directly or via affiliation.

Hope this helps.

- Jeff

 

I may have left out one pertinent fact.

Even a 62 year old man with the nickname Fit Santa can get a battery out of a Prius without causing back trouble...

The only special tools I needed were a metric set of sockets and a torque wrench, both from Harbor Supply for under $30 total.

Best of luck - I think avoiding the $200/hr mechanic fee may be the best cost leverage, whatever you choose to do.

- Jeff

 

The thing about refurbished is that you're taking an old, worn out battery and replacing it with an old, worn out battery. If one of your spark plugs died would you go replace it with a used one from a car with similar miles to yours or would you take that as a hint to replace all of them with new ones? Because that's what a refurbished battery basically is and why they want your battery as a core. They take your working cells/modules as well as from other cars and make full batteries out of those. But all of them are old batteries that may last another 3 years or another year or another week. You never know.

A new battery would be best. You can't go wrong with Toyota OEM. I am kind of liking the idea of upgrading to a Project Lithium battery but am still on the fence to that idea.

 

Really good point. In my area, $1600 for new battery, refurb is about $8-900 "installed taking your core".

A refurb original battery (first fail) is probably 2-6 bad cells and 22-26 tired cells that can be reconditioned. Using something like tmr-jwap's setup / 2 (4 chargers instead of 7), you're talking about $1000 in one-time costs plus call it $100 in replacement cells. 2 hands-off cycles a day and labor leads me to a reasonable "tired" battery replacement of about $500 makes sense to me, but some of the shippable replacement batteries (no labor) are already above the Toyota price.

So at $500 for remanufactured (tired old) I might do it with someone in business for 5 years and a 1 year 100% warranty. More than that and the new, balanced, matched Toyota battery seems a lot smarter - unless I can't afford $1600 (plus temporary $1500 core charge) and I need a working car now.

 

Don't put another used battery in... u have super low miles....and better than a gen 3

 

Totally disconnect the batteries.
Read each batteries voltage.
Replace the lowest voltage ones.

 

There is a bit more to it than that.

1. Capacity differences
2. Self-discharge differences
3. Internal resistance differences

It would be a real hassle to dissemble a battery, replace modules based on voltage alone, put it back together then have to do it again in a month when the module(s) that were just about to fail...failed.

Unless that was just sarcasm...

- Jeff

 

It can and has been done before. It's basically the same thing as a refurbished battery, only it costs around $30 or so per bad module. You can also move all your modules around so the middle ones are closer to the ends and ends closer to the middle. That way you give them a little more life since the middle tends to be the hotest and thus they wear out a little faster there.

 

Agreed, it can be done and can get you back on the road fastest, no dispute. It's just a lot of labor that might have to be repeated in a very short time. At minimum I would fully charge the cells while in the car (driving), pull it out and check voltages, then check voltages again every 24 hours while I had it out to see the rate of self-discharge. Checking IR using a meter and headlight bulb is also quick and easy - approximate by doing a 2 min discharge with the headlight and compare voltage loss, pull the bad ones that lose the most voltage compared to the others.

Also, if you take it apart to replace a module, check for corrosion on the bus bar and inside the ECU connector. Just like changing the oil.

Capacity differences take all the time to measure, but you can probably identify the worst modules with a couple of hours of additional testing.

-Jeff

 

I been through the entire battery game.
High end charger and all the bad stuff...
The guy is low on cash.... and maybe not to technical.
I bought a new battery.... it's just the only way you can trust that part of the car.

 

Yep, that's my conclusion as well - buy an entire new battery if you can afford it. ($1600)

Install it yourself with some voltage safety, a metric socket set and torsion wrench. (save $3K) - takes a Saturday and some youtube time in prep.

Pull the battery, check corrosion, ECU, buy some modules (check before you pull it with Dr. Prius or Torque or other OSB tool) - 2x number of bad blocks in modules, test voltage drop, IR (load test), swap the worst out and get on with life ($70 per bad block, plus a cheap multimeter and a headlight bulb if you don't have one) - cheap and quick solution. - takes a weekend at best, maybe a holiday weekend...

If you like science projects and understanding how things work, buy a couple of chargers and prepare to be without your car for several weeks.

- Jeff

 

Addendum - not sure how the new battery comes - if it's just the battery and hugger frame (with busbar and cables), check the old ECU for corrosion. If it's the whole assembly, then its plug and play.