I'd like to swap in this Varta AGM with the same capacity as mine which is a 2 year old EFB NIssan battery and do it myself. AGM is clearly better tech then EFB in general and especially for start-stop and Qashqais clearly kill batteries. Is there anyone who made the change and has NOT had it reprogrammed and had problems or not?
I've spent hours reading on here and can't find anything definite. There are lots of stories of people who had Nissan, Halfords or RAC swap them from EFB to AGM and reprogram them, and also lots of people saying "I THINK you should replace EFB for EFB" and "I THINK you need to reprogram it if you do change"!
I'm not looking for more of those comments please! Oh and the RAC guy who recovered me to the dealership said I should upgrade to AGMs and that I didn't need to reset anything if it was the same capacity as the original - but again I'd prefer to hear from someone who has actually done it! If it's relevant I have a bluetooth OBD II reader and have used CarScanenr with it to read and clear fault codes on the car.
Thanks very much.
Andy
If anyone is interested in reading why I think/know my battery is bad and my story with the awful Nissan stealership you can read below:
All my safety systems refused to work and I had all the warning lights on the dash and a start-stop error on the warning screen. The current battery is only two years old and is a genuine EFB Nissan battery fitted by the dealership. Stupidly, based on the poorly written website I thought I had 3 years warranty on the new Genuine Nissan parts fitted by a dealer so I took it back to them. Of course it was only a year's warranty and they told me the bettery was fine and charged me £750 to replace the alternator! The last time I took it to them they changed the battery and told me the battery had ruined the starter motor and changed me hundreds to change them both. If I'd realised that I didn't have warranty on the battery I would have just swapped it myself to see if that fixed things. At this point I'm pretty sure that either they made up a job to do to get money out of me or the bad battery was making the alternator look bad.
I was convinced the battery is ruined, but they refused to discuss it and told me I needed a new alternator and while the battery was low it was fine. I explained my investigations and asked them how they knew it was the alternator and not the battery, but they just said I could pay £150 for the investigation they had already done and take it elsewhere! I'm never going back there. They refused to even say if they had tested the battery away from the car or not or attempted to charge it and monitored it - basic obvious fault-finding as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway beforehand, I fully charged the battery twice outside of the car overnight with different chargers and it reached 12.8v. Within a few hours it always dropped to 12.4v. Nissan weren't interested in hearing that. The status screen shows the alternator working fine (I thing). It jumps around a bit between 13.5v and 14.5v when the engine is running.
Since the new alternator I did a 1.5 hour drive to Kent and back again on the motorway and the battery voltage is showing at 12v now! Showing similar voltages on the status screen to before when it's running.
This experience persuaded me to buy a Haynes manual, an ODB reader and to do as much work on the car as I could instead of paying the rediculous prices they wanted to charge. It's been a while since I've worked on a car or motorbike and all the tech definitely makes it more challenging, but I recently changed all the pads and discs myself to Brembo and saved £800 from the dealership price. Then I had a glow plug ODB error even after clearing the codes and after testing the continuity I found one was totally broken (and very bad looking after removing it). So I've replaced the glow plugs with NGK ones, cleared the code and no more error codes. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself about those jobs, but I'm very worried about my low battery voltage and want to fix that next.
