[Review] Prolong Reconditioning Kit

Good info, continue the update.

 

I recently bought just the charger and am seeing very positive results. But was tempted to go to the next step so bought the 2 light bulb discharge kit and the discharge cable. I was disappointed in that I have to go back in there and cut up the charger cable and re-install it to the relay contactor. And now there's a fuse buried in the battery box so if that pops you have to go back in the battery box again.
From an Engineering standpoint I think they could come up with one harness with maybe a connection box at the charger end that houses the fuse and does it all so the customer does not have to go back in to the battery box again and change it. That way it would be a seamless transition to discharge. And offer only one harness.

Anyway not having discharged it yet I too am confused also about the discharge levels and when to change the light bulbs. The 2 charts provided on there website seem to contradict themselves.

Btw, how many miles on your battery? I have 96K on my car and I bought it new. The Florida heat got me.

How long of a charge/re-balance did you do after the discharge?

 

This is a fair criticism, and the number one reason we receive post sales phone calls. We are working on addressing this as quickly as we can. How to discharge using the Prolong Simple Discharger is going to be the topic of our first ever video that will be coming out very soon. It should be released by Sept. 15th (I think). We are going to be making several videos over the next few months to better communicate how to use our products. Hope you guys can stand to see my ugly mug, because yours truly is going to be the star of the show ;-)




In the mean time, give us a call at 800-589-0730 and we can talk you through the process.

 

Ok Jeff thanks,

Regards,
Ray

 

Well, how was it in the long run?
Was it worth it to buzzer with expense and regular procedures
as opposed to just getting a new battery ONCE with guaranteed results and no maintenance?

(Not to mention some possible extra fun

)

 

The battery are DC bulbs are AC so there a short to DC

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Incandescent lamps are resistive wire filaments and don't care whether it's AC or DC. There's no inductive component.

At 200V, you should have matched 120V-rated loads in series. Does anyone know why the lamp base blew up in the video? Bad math? Bad wiring? Maybe both? Good thing the guy wasn't hurt--I hope he had eye protection in addition to the nice gloves.

 

Without seeing the wiring, it's impossible to say what he did wrong. Thankfully our light bulb dischargers have never done that

 

Well kinda true but the light design for 120 volts 100 Watts that .88 amp he putting over 300amp in to the light was my point. Better off doing one or two cells at a time much easier to do and then charge it back up

but just running the AC at max and parking the car well to the samething then going down a big hill to charge it

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Incandescent light bulbs are nonlinear conductors. It's about 1.3A when wired in series, no where near 300A. You might find this helpful:
Nonlinear Conduction : Ohm's Law - Electronics Textbook

 

OUCH! My goodness that looks molto serioso! I would guess a short or mistake somewhere in the wiring! I used the 2-lamp setup when doing my first discharge/recondition about a year ago, and remember that there was a short flash from the base of one of the 200W lamp bulbs when I removed it at the first bulb change. Looking at your video makes me wonder if there might have been a fault in the base of the lamp you used (I've had bad lamp bulbs on more than one occasion). BTW I use Nitrile gloves, and although your Gauntlets-Of-Ogre-Power might be fine for insulation, I find that they reduce my pleasure (…so to speak) - from my previous postings re. Prolong, you'll see I have much the same reservations as you re. the discharge cycles being difficult to monitor and predict, but if you follow my posts, you will learn that the most recent full recondition (see posts passim) was totally successful (using an Intelligent Discharger), took about 80 hours in total, and I can report that the SoC is spending most of its time now in the high-greens (62% to 75%); the MPG is about what I would expect for this time of the year (gasoline mixture) and my driving mostly short runs about town. - hope this helps - Wil

 

Please stop.

Software limits both battery charge and depletion about 30% on both ends so no matter what you do the car if healthy will not allow you to deplete the hybrid battery more that 70% nor come close to fully charging.
OnLy way to fully 100% charge or discharge is manually with outboard system like prolong.

 

Wasn't aware of limits but would use a 220V DC to AC 110V /220V and use a heater that will do both 110 or 220v with a variac so you can turn up the voltage slowly easier on the batteries but I thought if you depleted the batteries completely. I thought you have to have a special charger to charge it I would probably use a car charger with the variac that can do 2amps or less to charge the battery adjusting to the proper voltage

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Or the base was 60watt base max


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Nope, those open keyless bases, even plastic ones, are rated at 300W or more. The ones I just checked said 600W. And that was not a thermal failure, which would have melted slowly--it sure looked like a very low impedance short circuit. I agree with the above it was most likely a wiring fault.

 

I see a couple possibilities on the lamp base blowing up. One is that the wires looked pretty bad. Used? Perhaps the sockets weren't up to snuff either. Sometimes the hot connection in the base gets wimpy and doesn't make solid contact. I've had several light fixtures where that happened and I had to reach in with a hook of some kind to pull it out and get some tension on it. This being a DC circuit, there's a pretty good arc when the bulb screws in and makes contact and a bigger one when it breaks contact. If the socket was loose, there would be lots of arcing and heat build up in it. Because of that arc, I'm considering finding a suitable switch to put into the wires of my Prolong discharger to avoid wear and tear on the light bulb socket and the bulb itself.

The other possibility is that maybe the guy had the sockets wired in parallel rather than series. Way more current and heat that way.

Edit to add: I got the Prolong because we had two Gen 2 Prii. Even though I now have a PiP, my wife still has her '07 Gen 2.