Time for a smallish update on the Prius.
I recently
replaced the 12V battery. I had looked into alternatives, but with the cold weather we get here and it being my wife's car I decided to just get an OEM style AGM battery ($200) instead of going lithium or something.
However, when I opened things up in the back of the Prius, I found water... a lot of water.
This is actually a few inches of water in the battery compartment!
So I did some digging online and found that this actually isn't uncommon. There is a crack that develops at the top corner of the hatch and you get water in your trunk.
Thankfully, the fix for this is pretty simple. Grab a tube of silicon and smear it around the crack. Simple enough so I got a tube of silicon and a new battery and went to work.
So I pulled everything out of the rear of the car. Here is the spare tire well. It had about an inch of water after removing the tire. Thankfully the rubber drain plugs are easy to pop out and it drains out easily. I toweled it down and left the hatch open in the sun for it to dry off.
Here is the battery compartment. There was 3-4 inches of water in it! Again, there is a drain plug and I drained the water out of it that way.
Next up was the fix for the leak. I popped up the rain channel cover (very easy since it was plyable from sitting in the sun) and found how far the crack went. I cleaned up the area very well with rubbing alcohol because silicon is picky about what it sticks to and you need as clean of a surface as possible. Then I just smeared a thin layer over the crack and surrounding area with my finger. I did this to both sides of the hatch corners as the other side was cracked as well.
According to info I found online this fix does it pretty well. Thus far I haven't found any additional water in the back.
