EV warning light on following HV battery replacement

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w7gz

Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2017
Messages
23
Today I replaced the HV battery in my 2011 with one from the scrapyard (Nissan absolutely refused to honor their warranty :evil: ). Everything went smoothly, car powered up just fine, and I began charging it like normal to 80%. Everything looked good, and I have 12 bars now and 100 miles of range displayed. But as I started my test drive, the EV warning light was illuminated, and the car was limited to 25 mph. Some kind of limp-home mode or something.

Now, I'm thinking that the new battery might have been a warranty replacement in the 2011 donor car (if so I got a great deal :D ). It was black instead of pale green, required different mounting brackets in the rear, had different hole patterns for the plastic covers, and just looked new. The plastic covers seemed not to be original to the car because they bore address tags indicating that they had been shipped directly to the San Diego dealer, unlike mine.

The question: if this is in fact a new "lizard" battery, would that have turned on the EV warning light without ECU reprogramming? Is ECU resetting normally required when the HV battery is replaced? What other causes would turn on the light and hobble the car?

Also, I tried 3 different OBD2 readers, and they all gave link errors. What reader is required for this car?

Dave
 
My issue has been resolved, so I'll close this thread with the answer for anyone else who tries this.

To read the codes, you need the Leaf Spy app plus an appropriate OBDII dongle. I bought the LELink Bluetooth Low Energy BLE OBD-II from Amazon.

After clearing the extraneous ones from when the battery was out of circuit, I was left with 4 codes, with P3102 Invalid Battery being the major one. This is the code that puts the car into turtle mode.

Clearing the code requires running the battery registration procedure by a dealer having a special Nissan smartcard. Your dealer may or may not be cooperative for this on a battery they didn't install. Mine was more than willing to do the procedure for me to counter my extreme unhappiness with them when they were not able to offer me a warranty replacement on the pack. Further, it seems that Nissan might not be pleased with owners replacing their own battery packs. In any event, it's a very quick procedure to sync the battery pack with the ECU, and one that your dealer knows about because it must be performed every time a pack is replaced.

It turns out that my new pack was a factory replacement done only 5 months before my salvage car was wrecked. If you are using the lizard battery, be sure to get the middle and rear plastic covers for the pack as well because the originals will not fit. Get the front one, too, if yours has any holes in it from driving up on curbs. No additional parts are required, other than replacements for the black plastic retainers that broke fingers when removed. With care, many will be reusable. Also, the safety interconnect on the new battery is different than the old one, but the battery should come with it anyway. It seems that Nissan changed the grounding straps used with the new battery configuration: I was unable to use most of my original ones, but was able to flatten one of them with a hammer and anvil and use it on the rear of the pack.

My Leaf now shows 12 bars and a range of 126 miles when charged to 100%. Much better than the 55 miles that the old battery showed. :D

Oh, and keep packrats out of your Leaf. I spent the afternoon repairing the wiper washer hoses that the little bugger chewed up. Dave
 
w7gz said:
It turns out that my new pack was a factory replacement done only 5 months before my salvage car was wrecked. My Leaf now shows 12 bars and a range of 126 miles when charged to 100%. Much better than the 55 miles that the old battery showed. :D
Why is this showing so much range on the guessometer? Have you been driving it? Can you post a Leafspy screenshot?
 
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