Thanks to PriusChat- combimeter fixed for $0.30 and a few hours of my time

congrats!

 

Well done. You have more patience than me!

 

Replacements are available for not very much.

Google: prius dashboard vent

and you will see them from Amazon, AliExpress (including a set of all 4), and other locations. Pretty sure all of the new ones are from China, so you might as well go with AliExpress and cut out the middlemen. These have been mentioned on Priuschat before, search and you will probably find. I vaguely recall that the plastic is slightly different (softer), which is probably a good thing in terms of not snapping off tabs.

 

One problem with these is that there were 2 versions of the driverside vents, based on early years or later years. It may even be only the driver center that has 2 versions, it's been a while since I messed with them. The Chinese replacements are based off only one version and if it doesn't match yours, the large cover with the power button will not fit correctly. That can be solved by getting a cover that matches. Wish I had better info on that about exactly which years are different, but I would imagine 04/05 were one style and 06-09 were the other

 

You have bigger nads than I. I bought the caps but once I looked at how they were connected in there I didn't wanna risk forking it all up. I had a local laptop repai man do it and he only charged me $35 which included him buying the 3 different sized replacement caps vs the one size fits all. Was way worth it to me.

Had the same issue with the vent plastic. Old plastic was brittle and crumbled apart. I thought I'd save some dough and went to the junkyard and all of them out of all the cars I dorked with crumbled in my hands. I only needed the two left vents so I bought them off Amazon. They were about the same cost as the combo meter. Well worth it though.