Have you bought a Civic Hybrid with those dreaded fault codes, and the IMA was totally nonfunctional, meaning the car was operating solely on the ICE, and after installing the maxx-volt charger, you were able to revive that battery pack, and keep it going by charging it occasionally, or perhaps frequently?
Uh, yeah and much worse! I bought an '06 on manheim auction via video feed only (simulcast), several hours away. I took a 1 way flight there and the IMA battery was so dead that after limping it to walmart to buy a new 12v battery, it would get me about 40-60 miles before it fully drained it. I had to plan my whole trip back sidelining for walmarts along the way and swap them out for new ones every 40-60mi. The IMA was so dead that the DC-DC converter was disabled by the BCM as the hybrid battery couldn't feed the 12v battery energy to charge it. You have to remember that these cars do not have alternators and they get their power from the IMA hybrid battery stepping the voltage down to 14 V. When they reach a certain threshold, the underwood battery charging gets disabled and then you're fuct.
The Maxx-Volts charger not only revived that IMA battery but as it turned out that civic was a ringer. It had the highest mpg out of all the ones I’d owned before. Probably attributed to original BCM software that may not have been “updated” by the dealer (scam). The dc-dc converter re-enabled and was back to charging 12V battery properly.
I mean you, personally, have you bought basket case Civic Hybrids like that, installed the maxx-volt charger, and it allowed them to resume useful service, and they would go into idle stop mode, at the stop light, as was originally intended?
Yes, all of them. Every single one.
They sell at market value of a solid working hybrid. Technically they are IMA rebalanced/refurbished to an extent at that point.
The basket case vehicles with the charger installed, as time goes by, have any of them "recovered" sufficiently, so that you had to use the charger less often?
Usually after about three soak charges, their behavior improves significantly. For rare cases where there may be a cell or cells with high internal resistance, they also sell a discharger that erases "memory" effect the battery has developed from charging and discharging in the same small % window all the time. It improves cell internal resistance as it breaks down internal crystalline dendrites within the cell layers that can be shorting them out. In my testing on my own cars, the battery temperature has run about 20*F cooler and the BCM rarely turns on the IMA cooling fan after I've done that procedure and driven the car in the same manner afterwards. This is a clear sign to me of lower internal resistance as high IR causes the cells to heat up and restrict the flow of current through the battery.
You won’t find that discharger listed on their site as its reserved for experienced charger users that have familiarized themselves with the original charger wiring harness connections when they installed it. It was explained to me that 95-97% of their product users will get their car back to normal operation and make the customer happy with just the charger and that’s held true for my own cars. So there’s no need to market it unless you’re someone specializing in hybrid vehicle repair or a hybrid battery servicing company.
There are very few that would benefit from the extra procedure and tool they have. Since I do so many hybrids I considered servicing batteries commercially, I did buy their discharger and have used it on a 2008 187k mi, and a 2007 w/ 201k mi which both benefitted in lowering the IR of the IMA battery and having it run cooler. The IMA battery meter drops very slowly when using full assist in those cars now and the IMA fan rarely turns on.
I’m sure another reason why they don’t market it publicly so they can qualify who would actually benefit from it and try to only sell it to those they think are responsible enough to use it without electrocuting themselves. I mean, this is one of the reasons why Honda won’t let technicians service the batteries, they can only shut off the breaker switch and pull the whole pack out as a whole and replace. They don’t want the liability of techs shocking themselves to death.