Overheating turtle in 2017 Leaf S.

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BlueLectroid

Member
Joined
Feb 24, 2018
Messages
5
We were passing a large crane at night going up a steep hill on a freeway near our home when suddenly a couple of warning lights and a chime came on in our Leaf. One of the warning lights was a little orange turtle. This had not happened before in 17 months of the lease and some longish trips in CA.

Our trip that day was 290 miles round-trip from the Bay Area to the Sierra foothills near Yosemite. At start, we had 55% charge. It was 105 degrees where we first charged, in Dublin. The battery temp indicator went from 5 bars to 9 after the first charge. The second charge was outside of Modesto, which pushed the battery temp to 11 bars (first red). After using 65% of our energy to get to our destination, we charged for 1.5 hours at a level 2 station, giving us 75% charge on leaving the casino, and the battery temp remained at 9 bars. Charging again outside of Modesto (DCFC) took us to 90% and 11 bars on the battery temp gauge. One last short charge in Martinez gave us 38% and still 11 bars on the battery, although charging was at 60% of the normal amps. Now it is 88 degrees outside at 10:00PM. Five minutes later we turtled on the hill with 30% charge indicated and were still able to drive at freeway speeds to get home.

Lessons learned: 1) Start the trip with a full charge obtained the day before. 2) Build time into the trip for battery cooldown. The Leaf was either being driven or charged during the entire 9.5 hr. trip. We could have charged less at the destination and instead, let the battery cool. 3) The car will turtle even below the maximum 12 bars of battery temp. 4) You can still drive at freeway speeds when turtled. This would not have happened with a 2018 Leaf, since we would not have had to charge as much.

Any other ideas for avoiding overheating turtling would be welcomed.
 
Would be nice if you posted battery temps from Leaf Spy, along with http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/?title=Leaf_Spy_Pro&redirect=no#Screen_1 so that we could see if it really was overheating vs. a bad module.
 
Yes, it was really overheating. You could see it slowly heat up throughout the day and today all is normal. I can't get LeafSpy to work with my car/OBD2/Android combination, though ODB2 scanner works with another app and another car, same phone. Brand is LELink. At any rate, I'm not an electric vehicle technician. The battery heats up a lot when charged at least partially 5 times in a day and it is 88-105 degrees outside. Maybe your vehicle does not do that, or maybe you know better than to do that. I figure it is up to Nissan to build battery protections and cooling into the car - within those limits, I'm not going to worry too much - guess we just hit one of those limits.
 
My current Leaf (owned '13) doesn't have a CHAdeMO inlet, so it's hard for me to get the battery real hot.

My previous '13 w/CHAdeMO was leased before Nissan began NCTC, so it's not like I'd want to DC FC much since it wasn't eliigible. Back then, the 2 choices were 59 cent/kWh Blink (for members) and EVgo that was charging $4.95 to start a session + 20 cents/minute. There were a few free DC FCs here and there, like the 3 free ones I used to use, some of the time. None of those are free any more.

Some of the other free ones in the area are either gone (e.g. Nissan's Sunnyvale research office (I never used it)) or broken a lot (VW's office in Belmont: https://www.plugshare.com/location/8428, never used it) or no longer free (e.g. (Boardwalk Nissan I think was this case, I also never used it).

This guy got his battery real hot https://web.archive.org/web/20170717073322/http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=22134.

If your phone doesn't have Bluetooth LE, LELink won't work. What model of phone is it?
 
Trying to get an idea of the steepness of the hill, as I can't think of a particularly steep freeway climb within 5 miles of Martinez. Are you talking about the bridge?
 
Thanks for the link to the guy who got his battery hot - his display looked like mine except I had a warning triangle and the orange turtle. I would love to get LeafSpy working - just won't connect to the OBD2 LElink scanner. Contacted the vendor and they were no help. Android 6.0 on Galaxy Note 4. Same scanner and phone work with a different app, different vehicle (Ford Escape).

Steep hill is highway 4 westbound from Alhambra to the Crockett cutoff. The crane was going 25mph. Maybe it is not extremely steep but it is long and will take 11% of car's energy from Martinez to Hercules. Steeper than the Altamont, I think.
 
BlueLectroid said:
Thanks for the link to the guy who got his battery hot - his display looked like mine except I had a warning triangle and the orange turtle. I would love to get LeafSpy working - just won't connect to the OBD2 LElink scanner. Contacted the vendor and they were no help. Android 6.0 on Galaxy Note 4. Same scanner and phone work with a different app, different vehicle (Ford Escape).

Steep hill is highway 4 westbound from Alhambra to the Crockett cutoff. The crane was going 25mph. Maybe it is not extremely steep but it is long and will take 11% of car's energy from Martinez to Hercules. Steeper than the Altamont, I think.

Thanks for satisfying my curiosity :) That's about a 600 foot climb. Enough to push that hot battery over the edge I guess.
 
BlueLectroid said:
I would love to get LeafSpy working - just won't connect to the OBD2 LElink scanner. Contacted the vendor and they were no help. Android 6.0 on Galaxy Note 4. Same scanner and phone work with a different app, different vehicle (Ford Escape).
That's really weird. Is it possible that other app is interfering? AFAIK, with Bluetooth LE dongles, no pairing is required. And, I think that your device should support it, unless your carrier possibly disabled Bluetooth LE.

Can you temporarily uninstall that other app? If that doesn't help, ask for help in https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=14285.

I've been using Leaf Spy Pro on 3 different Android phones w/no issue since July 2015. My dongles are Bluetooth, not Bluetooth LE. I believe Leaf Spy Pro didn't have support for the latter when I started using it.
 
BlueLectroid said:
I would love to get LeafSpy working - just won't connect to the OBD2 LElink scanner. Contacted the vendor and they were no help. Android 6.0 on Galaxy Note 4. Same scanner and phone work with a different app, different vehicle (Ford Escape).
Last winter when I was using my OBD2 LELink dongle to measure prospective Leafs in used car lots, I found that I had to power cycle the phone to get LeafSpy to connect to the dongle if I'd used the dongle in a different Leaf since my phone's most recent restart. (I figure this may be a feature, preventing LS from accidentally reporting on the wrong Leaf if you're in a parking lot with other cars that have OBD2 dongles plugged in.) Granted, I was using an iPhone and you're using Android, but the symptom matches.
 
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