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The benefits of reconditioning are clear. Aside from avoiding the immense costs of battery replacement, you will experience drastic boosts in performance which will manifest itself in the form of increased fuel efficiency.

Hybrid battery reconditioning combines a number of procedures to essentially reverse the aging process and bring your battery back to life.

First the battery is discharged well below the level that your vehicle would naturally allow for during normal operation. Then it is charged and balanced. This cycle is repeated several times over a course of about 20 hours. This deep-discharge procedure is a process that restores the capacity of the modules.

Reconditioning can restore your battery and vastly extend its lifespan.

Each hybrid battery ‘pack’ is comprised of many individual battery cells. Consumer hybrid electric vehicles have anywhere from 120 to 240 individual battery cells. Each cell is about the size of a typical D cell battery. At the beginning of the hybrid battery’s life, each cell easily provides all of the energy needed to propel the vehicle and to stay in sync with other cells in the battery pack. As time progresses, the battery will start to degrade and the cells will fall out of sync with each other. Results of this degradation include:

(1) usable cell capacity is reduced

(2) cells drift out of balance with each other (voltage delta).

The speed of this deterioration is determined by a variety of factors, including vehicle make/model, climate, driving habits, variation in battery cell construction, and more.

This battery deterioration means that the individual cells within the battery pack can have a different charge level and capacity – they are no longer ‘in sync’ with each other. Some cells can be ‘full’ while other cells in the same battery pack are ’empty’. The overall battery pack performance is limited by the vehicle’s battery management system to the weakest cell when discharging and the strongest cell while charging. As a result, the wider the cell imbalance, the narrower the usable range of the hybrid battery becomes. The car’s battery management system uses only a limited range of the battery cells actual physical capacity (80%-40% for Toyota and 80%-20% for Honda). As the usable capacity decreases and the cells become further and further out of balance with each other, the vehicle is able to use less and less of the batteries actual capacity. The vehicle cannot correct this imbalance problem on its own. The car cannot force the cells back into balance with each other.

If no attention is given to the hybrid battery, it will ‘fail’ and the check engine light/hybrid battery light will be illuminated. 

Great article at: https://www.torquenews.com/8113/one-secret-can-double-life-your-toyota-prius-hybrid-battery