Benefit of Prius Coolant Thermo Bottle and Grill Blocking

By storing hot coolant and re-releasing, it speeds up Prius warm-up time and it reduces emission.

First, the car was parked for 20 hours. I parked it at around 9pm on Thur and worked from home on Fri. I started it up on Fri at 5:25pm at 39 deg F after work and headed into Manhattan. As seen in the video, once the Thermo opened up, the temp raised to 122 deg F. That's very good considering 20 hours was passed and it was around 190 deg F when I shut down. Thermo bottle lost 70 deg F in 20 hours.

Once the ICE kicked in (to heat up catalytic converter), the coolant temp dropped to 70 deg F. I guess it is due to the flow of the 3.5 US Quarts of engine oil and heating up the remaining parts of the ICE. That's not bad considering the outside temperature was 36 deg F and the ICE started out at room temp.

I also have both upper and lower grills blocked. After driving 3 blocks without any light, I entered the highway. The first 5 mins, I got around 40 MPG. That's very good considering that I had to accelerate from 0 MPH to ~50 MPH during that time. The summary of the estimated MPG from the MFD screen.

1st 5mins: 40 MPG
2nd 5mins: 60 MPG
3rd 5mins: 65 MPG
4th 5mins: 55 MPG (Due to going up the bridge)
5th 5mins: 80 MPG
6th 5mins: 90 MPG

After driving for 10 mins, the coolant temp was reading at 171 deg F. By 15 to 20 mins of driving, the temp stabalized around 190 deg F.

One of the highlight in the video was maintaining around 30 MPG going up the Williamsburg bridge. This was an attempt to outclass some cars that advertised with 30 MPG on the flat surface highway.

The last 10 mins covered only 1.6 miles and when I shut down the car, the battery still had 6 blue blocks. The whole trip was 15 miles long.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• prius
• mpg
• coolant

[rrbcap]

Very good Job! Gotta love the Thermal Tank! Check out my Prius video :). BTW, you have a CAN232 Connector? I had a Java program that reversed engineered about 20 different values from the car. you could get RPM, Speed, car temperature, brake and gas pedal pressure, etc. Looks like you did the same thing :)

[usbseawolf2000]

I have Auterra dyna-scan with CAN. It does not read/show hybrid component data.... just the regular car stuffs like RPM, Coolant temp, etc... I would be interested in how you hooked up yours.

[mizu22]

Smart thinking, good narration and video work!

[usbseawolf2000]

Thank you. It is my pleasure to make these videos too.

[yogi4310]

Great. Thanks.

-- Boo

[F8L]

Another informational video. Thanks mate :)