Nissan Leaf battery upgrade

Do the numbers stack up on it?

Like, writing the cost of a system like that off over say 5 years, do you work out having a net saving that is worthwhile, considering the time, blood sweat and tears put in to make it happen.

I like all this technology, but I wouldn't dream of putting any of it in my home because it is only myself here in the evenings and with the small amount of electricity I use, it would not make sense on any level to turn my house into a microgeneration station. Even if it is a little more expensive, I don't mind paying the ESB bill for the simplicity of it and not having panels, batteries and feed in tarriffs to be thinking about and messing around with.

Whats your point .. its like someone hanging around a forum on public transport saying "I walk to work, whats the point in a bus pass??"

The numbers are different for everyone. Some people just pay a rip off installer €20k and their system will never pay for itself, not even with €1 electricity peak unit prices (that quite likely are around the corner)

Most DIYers are far more pragmatic, they do it for the environment and for their pocket. What makes you think a system will only last 5 years? PV panels last a lifetime - many many decades - with almost zero degradation. LiFePO4 prismatic battery cells (that most of us DIYers use) have a "life" of 2000 cycles, that is from empty to full and back. In practice you don't fully charge / discharge all the time, so that is roughly 10-20 years. And the life is defined as still having 75% or so capacity after the end of life. So still well usable after that so called "life", just a bit less capacity

Slave1 said it well, climate change is the biggest problem man has ever seen, we need to stop burning things. Soon, very soon. Not maybe 30% by 2050. In the next few years. Us people on the fringe seem to be more aware of this than most people and we are doing what we can to speed up this transition. Obviously the government with a massive stick could do a lot more to "convince" people too, but very little of that is happening unfortunately

Back on topic ....

My understanding is these battery swaps use a thing called a can translator like

They basically look at the messages between the battery management system (BMS) and the car, and they pretend to the car that the old pack is still present but they report much better results. Over a few charge discharge cycles the range displayed on the car dramatically increases.

In theory Nissan could detect this and do something but they don't. I presume most Nissan dealerships would be hesitant to do battery repairs, but they are hesitant now anyway, most battery repairs seem to involve replacing whole pack or sending pack to the UK. Everything non battery pack is the same totally unmodified.

I have not heard of any chademo to CCS upgrade in Ireland but again it just tells the car what it wants to hear, so very little is changed. It's more likely to be needed 10+ years from now when more sites are CCS only. Charge rate will still be the same slow rate.

Personally I think selling your car to someone who needs little range makes more financial sense and buy a car with the range you need. If you are doing high miles you probably need a newish car rather than running an old car to bits. As a local only car old leafs are great for school runs, shopping runs etc.

You'd be better off selling your Leaf and buying another one with more range. There's a Leaf 30kWh with high mileage currently for sale, I think on DoneDeal, for just €8.5k, which is great value for money.

LOL! But then you'd end up with a disgusting gaz guzzling PHEV though 🤣

I agree with unkel, just get another car if the range of the current car is not good enough. The only exception would be if the battery pack had a single failed module due to manufacturing fault: Then it would make sense to just replace that one module to remove the weakest link. But even in that case it might be difficult to get hold of a module of the same spec. There have been countless of module revisions over the years so getting the right type in at least similar health than the rest would be hard.

Most of the annoying bits of the original leaf were fixed in MY 2014 cars (battery chemistry, heater, rust proofing underneath, battery % display) so doesn't make sense to pour thousands into the early one.

It'd prob make more sense to just do the body work and drive that one , and sell the weak battery one ,

Hard to believe that car still has it's full 12 bars

The lizard from late 2013 onwards? Or was there a newer revision after that? The 24kWh was produced until some time in 2017 I believe. I remember the top spec SVE being sold for €19,995 on the road to clear old stock for the new 2018 model coming. Some people in here had paid well over €30k for one only a few months before 😶

So no way to tell if a particular car has the lizard battery?

It seems to be that some people lost the battery lotto when buying facelifted cars:

https://www.donedeal.ie/cars-for-sale/2013-leaf-low-60-000-km-nct-12-24/33489402

So it is suffering really badly from the capacity loss but only has 60k on the clock. The nissan report shows 5/12 bars remaining. This next car, on the other hand, has about twice the mileage, is a few months newer and still shows 11/12 bars:

https://www.donedeal.ie/cars-for-sale/nissan-leaf-24-kwh-120-tax-aug-24-nct-/33404114

These are extreme cases but really show the difference between two seemingly "identical" 24 kWh cars.

Ah of course. Nice one @...Ghost... all previous cars for worldwide sales were top spec only and built in Japan. The UK cars should be clearly identifiable from the country code in the VIN. Did I get all that right?