Helping a friend revive a 2002 Prius that had 3 modules leaking electrolyte. It's had the recall to apply sealant to prevent leaking but was poorly done. We've replaced the bad modules and have a new wire frame and bus bars but would like to clean the posts and reapply the sealant. What would be a suitable sealant? Thanks
The sealant that was used in that campaign was a special 3M product that may have been custom developed and never available through any other channel. It went NLA several years ago. It's probably not practical or advisable to spend time on terminal sealing at this point in the battery's life. The sealing campaign was a special case that made sense to fix a known problem on fairly new batteries, where there was a chance it could prevent any more work needing to be done on them for years to come. Now that your battery has aged into whack-a-mole territory, you'd just be driving yourself nuts trying to clean off and reapply sealant every time a mole needs whacked. There was a similar discussion back here where I think the poster was finally talked out of futzing with the sealant again. -Chap
Well this battery was not properly sealed as you could see electrolyte stains on the bottom on the case. Voltages are tight across all 38 modules and they all pass a 100 amp load test. Where voltages are varying is when a charge is applied. This was seen on Techstream through a force charge and also on a bench charge of individual modules. Some modules when charging will have rapidly climbing voltage. I presume this is due to the electrolyte leak?
The only part that made sense was the small piece of black, fiber material under the terminal opposite the vent nipple end. It has to be synthetic as the KOH electrolyte 'eats' organic material. Bob Wilson
