A regular car can do it.
But Jane’s car was dead too, from the time we knocked the trickle charger off the ledge. It gets better.
Round one.
Triple-A comes out, hooks up, says Jane’s battery is iffy, but maybe just needs a charge. We get it going.
We drag out the Prius manual and find no, do not open the back battery pack, which is a monstrous lot of volts. Go to the hood, take the black plastic cover off the terminal which itself has a red plus cap on it, rectangular. OK.
We jump it, no problem. Guy thinks it’s charged.
Round two.
Jane has a doc’s checkup (routine) for the morning, so I go out to double check.
Both cars, dead as mackerels on a sunny beach.
I call AAA again, (that’s the American Automobile Association) and out comes the same guy who’d been called to a neighboring town and took most of an hour getting to us…
Well, we pull Jane’s battery, and funny thing, though it had been sold to about in 2012, the sticker on it says 2009. This is not amusing. We are going to have a conversation with AAA.
So that gets replaced. And we can’t complete the sale because Jane has to find her new license plates. Which she does.
Then we jump the Prius again, and it takes.
SO we end up…
I don’t believe you can charge a slew of batteries in just one small time period that it takes to jump the car…..he should have known that! After all, they always tell you that after they give you a jump, drive the car XX number of miles to put some charge on the battery. Instant charging isn’t going to happen, since it’s a chemical reaction within the individual cells and elementary physics tells me that if he thought about it, instant charging without proper heat dissipation would be a very bad thing, even with NiMH cells, not just lead-acid batteries.
I hope Jane gets the money back for the battery. Even if the battery hasn’t been used, the chemical reaction between the acid and the lead plates does go on. If a battery sits without being used for too long, it is subject to sulfating and pretty much ends the life of that battery. As this battery was manufactured in 2009 and purchased in 2012, it’s already gone through about 60% of its lifespan for an average car battery. I think AAA has some ‘splainin’ to do…….
THey do.
And after that supper-is-about-to-burn break, I can say we fared much better on the second jump, in the dark, in the rain. The AAA guy backed out of the drive, we backed the Prius out, and continued on to the back streets where we braked and braked and braked until our green ‘stack’ or battery indicator was a lot happier.
Better yet, the Prius started quite happily this morning and Jane got to her appointment.
After which we ran down to Waffles Plus and had a reprehensible breakfast. 😉
Now we know how to jump the Prius: positive clip to the little positive thingie under the red cap inside the black box, the negative to wherever looks apt to clip to (bare metal) and it comes right up.
The culprit, we think, was lights—we’d left the dome lights on. And we’d been experimenting to see if we could leave our main lights on and just let the car shut them down. We’re not so sure this works. The manual says turn everything off. So we shall, I think, until we have a chance to get down to Spokane Valley and ask the Toyota repair folk.
Curious. Mine has on, off, and on when doors open. I only use the latter. On the very rare occasion I need the dome light some night, I just crack my door.
I don’t know about the Prius, but my Camry has an “Auto” position on the headlight stalk that will turn the headlights off but not the parking lights. We nearly left the airport for a 2 week vacation a couple of years ago with the parking lights on. We were already on the bus from the parking lot to the terminal when I decided I should go back and double check. Sure enough, the parking lights were still on. That would have been a bummer arriving back in the dark to find the battery dead. The headlights do stay on for 30 seconds to a minute after I turn the car off, which drives DH nuts. Nor do I know if it will turn off the fog lights; I always turn those off manually. The headlights I leave on “Auto” all the time; when the dealer or someone else has driven the car and turned them off I tend to drive down the street with no lights on for a bit sometimes.
The dome light switch is poorly designed also. It’s right next to the garage door opener button (Camry lets me program the car to my garage door opener) and it’s easy to hit the dome light switch when trying to open the garage door. There is no indication of what position the switch is in, so I don’t figure it out until I open the door in the dark and the dome light doesn’t come on. Makes me cuss. Since the dome light also stays on after the door is closed, it would be easy to leave them on since one of the switch positions is “On” whether the door is open or not. I remember when cars used to have a nice little slide switch that said “on” “Off” and “Door”, or at least pictures once we all started buying Japanese cars.
End of rant…
Weird. I have an older Accord. I’m not sure of the label–hard to read abaft the moonroof–but the dome light has an on/off/door switch on it. I leave it off: the footlights on the doors are enough, and I want to preserve my night vision.
The three trainable garage door buttons are flanked by a map-reading light for each side, so five buttons almost in a row. But while the door buttons are little fingertip nubs that require a determined push, the map light buttons are a couple fingertips wide, much taller, with a longer and softer push. It’s just impossible to confuse them.
I say weird since great ergonomics used to be a Toyota hallmark. Honda, too. I wonder if the rise of over-featured, ergonomically-lacking multifunction displays is part of the problem. (They’re ergonomically lacking since, being multifunction, any buttons have to serve myriad purposes; and, for now, touch screens have no feel.)
We used the dome light because of reading on the trip. And didn’t turn it off. Jane was also experimenting to see if we could leave the headlights in ‘on’ mode, despite the beep of protest when we turned off. The manual seems to indicate (in the back, under My Battery Is Dead—nice!) that this is not a good idea.
We have a ‘service’ light on because it’s due for a checkup, and we are going to ask the mechanics about the lights. The manual assures is the ‘service’ light is only advisory: this car comes with warnings about inspections, low tires, low gas, leaving your keys in the car, or having a door open… at least the ‘service’ notice is a light, not a buzzer!
My Accord is the high trim level that turns its lights off automatically.
But it still has the low trim dinging. Sigh.
I figure better to turn everything off – I turned the dome light off years ago; if I need it, I can turn it on.
I’ve had to get mine jumped twice, both times when the conventional battery hit its limit. (You get no warning these days. The charge falls off the cliff.)
Interesting. We’ll watch that. We’re on extended warranty, but still in the ‘new’ phase, so we learn things.
For future reference, when the big battery is low, you should be able to leave the Prius in Park to recharge (ignition on; “Ready”?) According to Wikipedia, it will take seven seconds for the electrics to prep the engine for running, pumping oil and heating the catalytic converter. (I doubt it’s a hard seven seconds with no accounting for conditions like temperature, but I do not know.) Then, the engine should start to recharge the big battery, and should stop when it’s recharged. The car must be in Park to run in “pure generator” mode like this.
The big battery is supposed to be able to recharge the little battery, which runs all the normal stuff just like an ordinary car; but, it’s not clear to me this can happen when the ignition is off: that’s a question for Toyota, maybe? I wonder if only the little battery was exhausted. (The standard for cars is, IIRC, 15 minutes with headlights on.) It might be that if the ignition was left on for a few minutes, the Prius would have jumped itself from the big battery, though if the little battery was truly dead–well, it probably runs the electronics.
Prii and other hybrids really need an ignition setting for, “I’m going away from the car, but keep the A/C and other accessories on, recharging yourself as needed.” I understand since the tsunami in Japan, many hybrids can act as power stations, enough to power a home, modestly; I wonder if they have such a setting. A kit to allow your Prius to generate normal home power may be available from Toyota at this point, but I’m not sure the ~1000W would be enough to keep your tanks running.
During Sandy, some people improvised using a 1000W inverter hooked up to the small battery:
http://thegreenenergy.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-hybrid-vehicle-as-generator.html
Another guy ran his power through a UPS, depending on the UPS to do the power conditioning and absorb surges, such as a refrigerator starting up.
Interestingly, I learn that Prii have no reverse gear. Reverse is electric only. Early Prii had some problems with steep hills in SF, but your newer Prius should be fine.
Filing for future reference.