So I've been unemployed for over a year, feeling depressed, and all that. I haven't had to drive my car and my wife parks behind me so I typically just drive hers especially the last few months. Dead batter. I put on the battery charger under the hood yesterday and the battery was charging, slowly. Like hours laters a couple idiot lights came on. I switched over to fast mode and when I went back out, nothing. No idiot lights, notta. My son found the battery jump pack which I've used before on our prius cars. NOTTA. Hoping that a fuse popped or something but I've never seen her this dead before. Any ideas on what to look at?
For starters you could check it's voltage. Fresh off a charger it'll likely read falsely high, they call it "surface charge". Turning on the headlights for about a minute will partially dispel that. For a better assessment acquire one of those digital battery testers, that tests Cjold Cranking Amps, gives a verdict on it's condition. That said, mostly sitting for a year, it's likely toast. What is your battery charger?
As Mendel stated; 'battery is probably toast'. As you stated in your post; what were the idiot lamps lit? Why did you think switching over to fast charge and firing high amps though you Prius wiring system was a good idea? I know some battery charging units will do 30,50, or 100A; so hopefully you've just blown a fuse and not fried some of your systems.
I have no cost diagnostic for 12v batteries that anyone can use. Take it out and go to an auto supply where they can "load test" it for free. No need to buy a load tester when you are out of work. A dead battery often will not charge. Simple as that and a fact known to mankind for more than a hundred years. When it shows fail, then decide what battery you want realizing the Prius battery is a special size agm with small terminals and a vent tube. However they have been around long enough where you can get a good price at an auto supply, Walmart, online or at a dealer. Believe it or not, dealers often have sales on factory batteries. I just received a 12v ad from a dealer for $169. Will a big charger damage your battery or car? No unless it is a 50 year old charger designed to directly jump start a diesel engine. And only if you put it on backwards. Same damage can occur if you put a Toyota battery in backwards as well.
OP clamped onto the jump-point, not directly to the battery terminals. So depending on the pathway and wire size that jump-point routes back to the battery terminal - IDK; when IDK; I tend to error on the side of caution. Once you let the smoke out; there's no putting it back in.....
The big concern for me is that the battey jumper will not get the car to power up. I read that there's a fuse under the hood fuse block that could have been blown, but I checked a couple times and can't seem to find out where to see it. The fuse is supposed to be UNDER the block so you have to life the fuse block to replace it. I have it trickle charging now, been a couple hours. Tomorrow or likely Saturday I"m going to pull the 12v from the son's priuse and crawl into the hatch area, release the emergency latch and try his bat in my car. I just want to see idiot lights before I buy a new 12v.
You can have a 12v battery so bad that it can not be jumped. Anytime you are jumping a car, the jump power has to bring up the dead battery to an acceptable voltage first. Toyota's jump start instructions actually says leave the jump active for 5 minutes prior to a start attempt. In most cases this is not necessary but in some cases 5 minutes or 5 hours won't raise the dead.
The 125 amp fusible link is visible through an opening in the fuse box. You need a good light to see it. This fuse will be visibly blown IF a reverse polarity jump was attempted. Getting to it is the challenge. Normally it takes pulling the fuse box out of the car and them disassembling layers. A simple voltage check as shown below will further verify the 125a
It is better to connect chargers directly to the battery, and not through a bunch of consumers who will use the increased voltage of the charger as inappropriate for their properties. A pulse-type charger can produce both 16 and 18 volts at peak. For the battery, this short-term peak is not dangerous, but for car systems that are designed for a maximum of 14 V, this can be dangerous.
I hope the car systems aren't designed for a maximum of 14 V—the DC/DC converter puts out 14.7 routinely....
And certain battery charger/maintainers 'pulse' at high voltage, high current, no matter whether maintaining a battery or attached to jump points elsewhere on the network.
Well finally got around to trying the son's Prius' battery in my car yesterday. Great news is a new 12volt did the trick and she's back up and running. The battery is 5 years old, and I know I could have likely gotten 2 more years at least out of that battery if I hadn't let it drain like I did. I tried looking for that fuse under the hood and I couldn't see find it. From the picture posted here, it appears to be in a different position. I might look again for it out of curiosity. I'm still confused by the battery power pack and jumping the car though. I swear that I've been able to use that battery pack to get the Prius running. At one time the 12 volt just flipped a relay to enable the track battery to power the car. Is this still not the case? Shouldn't hooking up that power pack enabled the relay to get flipped? I know the pack was fully charged as we used it later that day with the telescope to observe the lunar eclipse. In any case, I guess I'm happy being out $180 instead of $15? for a fuse. LOL. Must be getting old if I don't feel like pulling a fuse block to replace a fuse. THanks for all the responses.
No that is not true. The 12v has to directly power ecus during the start process. After you get Ready, the high voltage battery and inverter converter combine to power 12v loads and recharge the 12v battery. As stated before, a battery can be so bad a jump won't help. A jump source has to bring up the other battery to an acceptable voltage first. Acceptable is usually 11vdc which is easy if your battery is 10vdc but impossible if your battery is close to zero or has a dead short. Toyota's jump start instructions in the manual suggest leaving a jump source energized for 5 minutes before a start attempt. This is to quick charge your battery first. A quick charge does not have to fill the batteries capacity, just raise the surface charge so the jump source is not dragged down. If an over night charge does not work, the battery is bad enough the jump box will fail as well. Many lithium jump boxes have a polarity and minimum voltage check once you are hooked up but before they provide power. Fail those checks and the jump box does nothing. Some have a bypass for those safety checks but that bypass is usually not listed on the jump box itself. It is possible, but not advisable, to remove your battery connection(s) and Ready the car on a jump source alone. As an experiment I once did this with a very small $19 alarm system battery (4 ah) jumping it to the front fuse box using 18 awg electronics clip leads. It worked because it only needed to power the ecus for a couple of seconds before the hybrid system took the 12v load.
