Thanks for the encouragement. Yes, it certainly seems like a good investment, even if I do have to replace my battery soon. Though I do believe I should be able to get a little more mileage out of it, since it's still able to start my car most of the time, and provide all its normal features, albeit at a reduced capacity. After everything I've heard I would never consider spending the money on one of Honda's replacements. It would definitely be a Bumblebee or ReVolt battery.

 

Update: I bought and installed a grid charger from Hybrid Automotive. After just one reconditioning session (charge-discharge-charge), my battery is running like new. Thanks for the help and advice!

 

Great news. As a preventative measure, consider grid charging with every oil change. Discharging should still be done periodically, but more on an as-needed basis. Maybe every other oil change.

Watch closely for recurring recalibrations. One here or there isn't an issue, but if they start happening regularly, it's time for maintenance.

Do NOT over-do it! Charging/discharging outside the 20-80% SoC range the car utilizes causes cycle deterioration. Doing it periodically is barely measurable. People have done it weekly and accelerated the deterioration due to increased depth of cycling and over-charge.

How many cycles did you do and how deep?

Steve

 

That's great to know. Thanks for the clarification there and the warning. I just did one cycle, down to 0.5V/cell.

 

Sounds good. I recently did this (0.5V/cell) on a friend's Prius while he was on vacation. The only outward sign of an issue was reduced mileage. There is software available that allows you to test the battery in the car. I was able to increase his available battery capacity by nearly 3X (625mAh before, 1625mAh after), and his mileage went up nearly 15%.

 

Nice! My car definitely drives a lot better. Haven't driven it around enough yet to see for sure the difference in mileage but so far it does seem to be improved. What software did you use to do the testing?

 

The Toyota Techstream software that the dealers use got into the wild several years ago. Many offer the sale of a USB cable that can connect with it. The accompanying "driver" disc also contains a copy of Techstream.

These products are referred to as "MiniVCI" and they can be had for typically less than $30.

To my knowledge there is no analogy for Honda.