Question about a battery on a used leaf I’m looking to buy

[Perseycat]

So I’m looking to buy this used leaf and my friend tested the battery with the leaf spy app and we saw a few low red cells. Should I worry about this or is it something that can resolve itself after running it down all the way and charging it up.

[LeftieBiker]

It doesn't look bad to me. Given the difference between the Hx and SOH (usually taken to represent remaining capacity) I'd say the actual capacity is closer to 85% than 89%, but I'm not an expert on this. IOW the car will quite possibly "drop" a capacity bar this Summer.

[Perseycat]

Ok great thanks!

[cwerdna]

Don't worry about the red. It's related to shunting.

Where did this Leaf reside before? Model year? Build month? That's found on the driver's side door sticker.

[Perseycat]

So I got the car fax on it and it was built in July 2014 it’s a 2015 SL. It’s had 2 owners, one was the lease owner and the other one was the guy who’s selling me the car. What does shunting mean?

[cwerdna]

Per the Leaf Spy manual

Shunt Order This option controls the highlighting in Red of the cell voltage bars on screen 1. A Red battery voltage bar indicates that the Shunt is active for that cell. Shunts are small resistors that can be switched in to drain a small amount of energy from one or more of the 96 cells that make up the high voltage battery pack. This is the method used by Nissan to balance the pack by draining energy from the high energy cells. This works because charging stops to prevent overcharging the highest energy cell. So by reducing the energy in the highest energy cell all the other cells are able to be charged to a higher level.

If you really care, search for posts by Turbo3 (author of Leaf Spy) for the word shunt. As I said, don't worry about it.

You didn't answer where it resided before. It's important to know to see whether the AHr, SOH and Hx values make sense for that model and year and build month vs. being a reset victim. Reset examples below:
http://daveinolywa.blogspot.com/2014/11 ... -read.html
viewtopic.php?p=489807#p489807 - read posts by AntronX in that thread

Can you update your location info via your user name in the upper right > User Control Panel > Profile tab? That way, we don't need to ask in future posts/threads or do sleuthing to deduce it.

What are your daily driving needs in terms of miles? How much city vs. highway? Will you have the ability to charge at your work/destinations?

[Perseycat]

So it’s alwats resides in Portland, OR. I live in Vancouver, WA...not very far away. As far as our current driving needs, right now we only have one car so my husband will be taking the leaf to his work. He would charge it overnight and it will sit for 8-10 hours at work. We live in Vancouver and he works in Portland. It’s about 11 miles mostly highway. I might drive it around some days if I need to run errands and then that would be both highway and city. I’ll update my location in the settings as well. Thanks for the info!

[alozzy]

I'm surprised the pack has degraded that much, given that it's a Portland car. The climate of Portland is ideal for a LEAF. You can probably do better for a 2015, but price obviously plays a factor too.

You're also lucky to have a lot of supply to choose from in your area:

https://m.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/ ... tyleCodes=

In particular, checkout Platt Auto as they typically have a bunch of used LEAFs to choose from and apparently they'll even give you LeafSpy reports.

[LeftieBiker]

When you look at future LeafSpy reports, only worry about red (shunted) lines that are VERY MUCH lower than the other lines. Even that isn't usually a problem, but huge differences in voltage can indicate a bad cell or two.

[Perseycat]

Thank you for the info.