How to Recondition and Refurbish a Honda Insight IMA Battery Pack

I have read that an IMA battery pack is as good as the worst stick. With that said, I wanted to find out for myself. I got the dreaded IMA and Check Engine Light code P1449 along with a blink code of 78 on one of my Insights, so I grid charged the entire pack, took it out and got it down to the stick level. I used the light bulb discharger kit and added some extra wires to attach an H4 headlight along with an on/off switch to do a voltage drop on each stick. I used the grid charger harness with some alligator clips to make connection to each battery stick. I found one obviously bad stick that dropped 3.14 volts within 2 minutes. I ran a self-discharge test over 3 weeks and then I replaced the bad stick with a known good one with matching voltage with the rest of the pack, reinstalled my pack and it worked perfectly again! I can see why people don't do this, but I think it was totally worth the effort. It was annoying, but I believe it's worth the effort in savings. I only did this after the charge/discharge did not work. The IMA light would come on instantly, so I decided to share my process since it has been so successful for me. Some info that will help you along: The IMA pack is made up of 20 "sticks" or '"modules", each of which is made up of 6 "D"-sized batteries. The car taps into pairs of sticks and monitors voltages for those pairs, so there are 10 pairs of sticks and 10 voltage taps. The battery condition monitor or BCM, is responsible for those taps. The BCM is one of the square silver computer boxes on top of the battery pack, on the left side if you're facing the pack from the hatch. The taps connect to the BCM at the back of the computer. When you open the battery compartment, the tap connector is right in front of your face on the left hand side. You can insert your multi-meter probes into the back of the grey plastic connector plug and check the voltages of stick pairs. This is very important information to ensure your pack is well balanced. Here is a reference point: https://www.insightcentral.net/cdn-cg... FYI...I recently changed the order of how I recondition and refurbish these IMA battery packs. When I get a core, my first step is now to load test each battery stick before I do anything else because it is currently in it's "failed" state. The load test will show you the obviously failing sticks. Sticks that fall below 6v in 2 minutes are bad. Sticks that remain above 6v are likely good. Once I determine the bad sticks under load, I'll note that just like I normally would, and then proceed to the grid charging/discharging process and finally self-discharge test over 3 weeks.