HV Battery Rebuilding
Garage-EV | HV Battery Rebuilding
One of the biggest question regarding Hybrid and Electric vehicles is what do you do when the High Voltage battery is faulted, or deemed "no good" ? Most people assume once the High Voltage battery has issues or capacity falls, it is discarded as waste and expensive to replace. This is not really the case at all !
One prime example of this would be one of the most popular non-plugin hybrids; the Toyota Prius. This could be extended to other similar Hybrid makes and models but we will use the Prius as our main example. Many of these HV batteries and most, if not all, are able to be rebuilt. This is mostly handled by the vehicle manufacture under warranty but as these vehicles age the aftermarket should be tooling to handle these repairs. This is something we do at Garage-EV !
How would I know if my battery capacity is reduced ?
In many cases until there is a large imbalance or shorted cell, for example, many driver’s would not see any obvious warnings that their HV battery is starting to degrade. One telltale sign would be your fuel consumption will increase. This is because the HV battery capacity has fallen and your gasoline engine would actually be starting up more frequently to charge the battery. Hybrids would carry on driving as usual but you will be loosing one of the main advantages of your hybrid as it starts to function more like a typical combustion engine vehicle.
How can I fix this ?
In many cases the fault is NOT the whole HV battery. It is most likely only a few cells in the battery that could be faulted which would cause the capacity of the whole battery to be decreased.
At Garage-EV we can test, isolate and replace those bad cells with good cells to refurbish your battery. Also we would be replacing the busbar connections which are known to corroded and clean any debris from the cooling fan.
Overall hybrid and electric vehicle batteries are very robust and can service your vehicle for many kilometers. If the battery shows signs of deterioration there can be a more cost effective resolution than a full on replacement. So not to worry, contact our team at Garage-EV and we can see what options are available to keep your investment on the road and running as efficiently as possible.