
17/09/2025
Our black Nissan Leaf Tekna started life in the UK in 2013 as a smart state of the art electric car with a 80 mile / 128 km 24kWh battery. Things rapidly moved on with Teslas quickly taking over with great styling and 3-4 times the range / battery size. Nevertheless for city driving, the Leaf is still a very impressive car to this day. We acquired our Leaf from a salvage auction in 2020 after receiving a nasty rear end crash, but no damage to the main mechanical and electrical components. It's amazing how quick insurance companies are at righting off vehicles. Thankfully there is a thriving repair industry that saves decent cars from being crushed and we happily used the Leaf for day to day driving. The biggest problem was the depleted battery. At around 60% it was still a usable run around and chose it as a guinea pig for making a V2H Vehicle to House hack via a 4kW grid-tied inverter hooked up to our main house 28kWh battery. It worked but it required bypassing the proper leaf plugs which was not so convenient plus it became tempremental with a number of error codes appearing than needed to be cleared in Leaf Spy. Clearly the Leaf on-board computer knew something was 'Strange'. In late 2023 the computer finally told us the game was up. I believe there was a fault with the pre-charge resistor and main contactors in the main battery pack. So hard to know for sure but trawling through the on line Leaf community gave this impression. It's hard to know if our 'Hack' had caused the problem or not. So what to do? Remove the main battery, open it up and inspect? Or get a new larger 62kWh battery from China? We chose the second option but a risky one. At over 8,000 euros it was a significant investment but nothing compared to the OEM Nissan battery at over twice the price for the same original size. With great relief the Leaf computer accepted it's new battery and we now have a 379km range on full charge, which is absolutely fine for us. It's an extra 200 kg or so heavier so its not quite so quick like having 3 extra passengers on board and I dont expect the same economy. For anyone thinking of swapping a Leaf battery it's not so difficult, it really is plug and play as the manufacturers say but you do need to find a friendly local garage with a lift, a palette truck and a rising table....those batteries are crazy heavy. Next question is what to do with the old battery. Here in Greece there is nobody who recycles and in any case 60% may be rubbish for a car but its great for certain static applications so we'll hook it up for some experiment or other. Because of the suspect contactors inside we will probably convert the 400V battery to a far safer 48V without the need for contactors. Or anyone out there looking for a DIY home set up let me know.