“Tiny Prius Battery” - Reconditioning modules on-the-go (work etc)

So, I made this. Has anyone else ever done this? It looks so cute and ‘dinky’. Basically I took it to work and had it running on my hobby charger one module at a time at work today, and will swap out the 5’cells after cycling / charging up to 8.4 volts and leaving for 24 hours before releasing the pressure.

Anyway it seems silly but if anyone wants to work on spare cells one at a time, it is a way to keep them from expanding, and you don’t need to drag the whole pack into the house in winter and get yelled at by your wife or whoever

 

My Gen1 has Gen2 cells. It will be my daily driver soon! I will keep a high capacity 12v battery that I have, connected to the standard 12v battery.

I built a whole battery for the Gen 1 from two Gen2 batteries. One was legit with 2 dead modules, the other is an actual Frankenstein battery. I tested the modules over a few weekends, rejected the ones with dead cells. Then I charged all to 8.4 volts at 3 amps, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.2 amps. Then after the rebuild I matched the voltages manually. Then I ran the car for a few miles, then I balanced the battery a module at a time, as it was out of balance.

Since then it had been fine, but I am going to need to whack a lot of moles.

The reality is that ‘whack a mole’ is actually avoidable, even with a Frankenstein battery, if you use ‘enhanced car sympathy’. I think. But - I need to get live data from the car to my phone or tablet - watching the max, min block voltages will allow ‘whack a mole’ to be avoided (and more importantly should prevent weak cells being reversed for 1 second and thus being destroyed).

Lithium does sound good; I’ve left my Nissan Leaf with my friend in the South (in NZ, south == colder weather). The car is driven fairly regularly, it prevents a lot of short journeys, and reduces battery degradation). A Leaf battery can take currents above a Prius NiMH (more accurately, it takes higher regen currents although that probably helps kill it even faster).