My new 62kWh battery is broken😞

hi I'm dollar from the future at the end of this video but enjoy our video where I try to upgrade my car to 62 kilowatt hours and do some rust proofing I thought this was just gonna be a fun fun quick video but it turned out to be something completely different so enjoy okay excuse the mess in the shop but I just removed this 40 kilowatt hour pack that I've been using since I think about a bit over two years maybe on this leaf and now we're installing a 62 kilowatt hour pack but as you can see here I'm doing some rust proofing and you might ask yourself why am I doing rust proofing but let's go outside and look at the battery that hasn't been rust proofed okay so let me show what happens to batteries that don't get restorated this is a seven year old 30 kilowatt hour battery which is hooked up to the grid by the way but more on that in another video and if we zoom in here on the back side we can see that rust is definitely starting to form and it's getting not so bad but quite severe in some places and um I've actually had way worse than this I recently had a 11 year old battery pack here I'll put some pictures up on here and it got so bad that the sides were completely rusted so you could just poke your fingers in through the battery casing which is uh very bad so yeah that's what we want to avoid so if we apply what we learned from the pack on the outside I'm using some metal paint I like using this brushed on applicants versus the spray paint because when you brush you can put on a thick nice coat and here you see that I I've only applied this thick coat on the sides of the battery and I've kept the top of the battery without any thick paint this is to help it to be able to dissipate heat better upwards when the battery pack heats up but I did spray a light coat of some rubberized sort of anti-scratch on the coat thing but this was a very very thin layer because I I wanted to be able to dissipate heat but again if you're doing this serious amount of frostproofing you might only want to do this if you're in a country that is very cold like if you do this in southern Europe you will risk insulating the battery too much and causing it to heat up way more than it should when you are rapid charging so yeah there are some pros and cons here but I'm in Finland and it's cold as here so this is what I'm gonna run with now we can look at the car okay welcome underneath the car here are the rails with the battery fastens and this Leaf is eight years old it's on 2015 so you can see that there is a significant amount of corrosion that is being formed here between where the battery pack and the like chassis meet this is the place that you cannot wash because there's gonna be lots of cover in covers in place Etc so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna brush off all this surface rust using a grinding wheel to get it nice and clean don't metal and then I'm gonna paint on this rust proofing paint so yeah let me do that another thing I forgot to mention was that there are some sections with bare paint that haven't been uh like rust proofed at all here but luckily these have managed to stay quite rust free so I'm gonna do uh something else here I'm gonna add uh sound proofing to these sections so I cleaned this up uh using some brake cleaner and then I stuck on one of these uh vitamin pads just to increase uh ride comfort and I've gone ahead and I've done all these sections that have this bare paint you cannot attach this sound deadening pads to places which have already gotten the factory on the coating spray because it won't stick there so it can only be applied in places where there is a bare paint or bare metal so yeah I'm gonna continue with that also before painting it here is our Corner that I have completed so all the rails and sections areas where the battery normal will mount it is completely covered in this rust proofing paint and these sound deadening pads this will make for a very nice end product speaking of overdoing it I also removed the terrible battery and cleaned off all the corrosion here on this metal plate and painted it black so now it's going to last a whole lot longer okay so I'm just about to roll the new battery in but I thought I would show you what this looks like so I've basically gone through all the common places where it usually rusts and I painted these and in some places I put these um these sound deadening mats and keep in mind I'm not going for 100 coverage I just want the hard to reach places when the battery is in that usually rust because I will Rust Proof the entire car at a later stage but this is just a bad thing so now we can put the new battery pack in okay some of you were a bit disappointed last time when I did a 62 kilowatt hour upgrade and I didn't show you the Springs so I'm actually going to fit the Springs this time and I also have the OEM these longer 40 millimeter longus this rear flanges that hold in the battery I painted this black also where the bolt holes are because um yeah you can see here that these like to start to rust especially at the bolt also yeah just some extra Protection keep in mind I don't want this to last forever just a bit longer than usual because I intend to keep this car for some time okay okay so here's our quick illustration why it's so important to get the right Splash cards this is the original the one that is furthest away and this is the new one intended for the e-plus battery and you can notice that it's a lot more deeper so this will make it so that it looks flush when the battery is mounted it won't look odd or anything so yeah it's very important that you get the correct Splash cards part numbers are in the description okay so real quick here here's to clear the pe3102 error code we can see that we have Turtle active uh warning light and I've taken out Leaf spy here and I'm gonna go with read dtcs and it has detected the p3102 invalid battery then I will go back and I will go into clear dtcs and I will select uh there's a special drop down here for p3102 select that execute and while that is working it disappeared now the car works that's it very easy very quick okay so I'm out doing the first charge test here and um I don't know if you can see this I haven't changed the Springs yet but you kind of can see it that the the rear sits a lot lower than the front so that is why those Springs are necessary so I'll just charge the battery up verify that it charges and yep then I will go in and change the springs okay so the last part of the job spring replacement so I remove the wheels uh under the rear shocks and I got the original spring out and here's a quick comparison and I don't know how good this will show up on camera but the new spring is it's significantly thicker yeah so I hope this will help out quite a bit let's see and we are done this is what it looks like now with the new Springs so it looks quite identical to the front uh it's very high I think we gained maybe like four centimeters so maybe like 40 millimeter ride height increase and yeah this is very nice so this accommodates for the larger battery very nice I'll go and test to drive it okay that really didn't go as planned so this new battery I charge it up and immediately when I started to drive it it's just a little uh check EV warning symbol on the dash and I checked the cells and there was some imbalance in the rear stack and this usually should make your alarm Bells go off inside your head so big insulation issue problem reported on the fault code vehicle will not be able to restart and while I was driving it it also cut all heat the HVAC system stopped working and I checked the codes while driving and it said that like high voltage error so you cannot get heat while driving which is quite critical in winter so this new battery is no good and what makes it worse is that it's a 62 kilowatt hour pack and the sales are quite hard to get um so even if I've opened it up and I find some broken cells or cells that have expanded or cracked or something it would be very hard to Source replacements so if you know of somewhere in the Euro Europe region where you can get sales please let me know but yeah I'm feeling a bit down at the moment uh because this battery was quite expensive and it doesn't work I can't drive the vehicle like this because it will randomly stop because the problem is too severe it's leaking high voltage to ground which makes it yeah it you can't drive it so I guess this is uh part one of a series where we either fix this battery or scrap it or something but I've been spending so many days now rust proofing this car and rust proofing the battery because this was going to be the final battery upgrade that I did for this car I really wanted to focus on CCS now but um yeah it looks like CCs is gonna have to wait until we get this bad resulted I don't know what I'm gonna do if I'm gonna downgrade back to the 40 or yeah let's see but if you have any thoughts ideas uh if you want to cheer me up put a comment down below and I'll see you in the next video thanks for watching bye

Channel: Dala's EV Repair

Views: 58,945

Keywords:

Id: bJzX3OLwv1E

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Getbackinyourhole]

What an awesome video! Sorry about the loss. Is there any lessons learned? Could you somehow test the battery before installing it?

[u/scara1701]

Does the rusted casing of the battery pack mean that the cells are exposed to the elements? Or is there an inner casing that still protects these?

I hope the battery fix will turn out to be less complicated than expected.

[u/SjalabaisWoWS]

Always well done videos, but a shame to hear this went South. Thank you for educating people to do this right!

[u/bingagain24]

So no chance it's a loose pin in the main connector?

[u/LoveEV-LeafPlus]

Sorry this happened. Is there any way to check the battery before installing? Anyway I am anxious to find out how you recover. Good video, bad outcome, so far.

[u/mihaicl1981]

I also want to follow your lead and invest some money in a 62kwh. Have to travel 300km and around 300m elevation this weekend

Will have to do it in 2 steps with my Aze0 40kwh(upgrades at my own cost) .

With a 62kwh it would have been one stop (on the way up)

But these are so hard to find in Europe.

Seen quotes of more than 10k.

Would have probably made the same mistake...