Assuming the Niro has the same DIN44 size as the first-gen Kona (which I'm 99% sure it is) after much research I was aiming for what Century-Yuasa recommend here in New Zealand, an AGM type in the DIN44 size, part number LN1-MF. Oddly, the same company recommend flooded types in Europe for the Kona or Niro EVs, the YBX3012 or YBX5012, no idea why that is.

However I couldn't buy the LN1-MF because Toyota buy every one imported and flick them off to Prius owners for $800 at their dealers. So, the next best option was a 'stop-start' AGM, the Century DIN44LH-AGM. I can't find the UK equivalent for either of these but they must exist.

It's been installed 3 months now on my 2018-built Kona and I'm very happy with it. It definitely has more resilience to loads than the OEM 'Rocket' which I never had any problem with over its 5 years installed.

When you install a new 12V battery you need to be sure and 'drop' 12V power rather than support it during the changeover as some installers do. The car will take note of that then spend up to a week probing the new part and will eventually settle into a suitable charging schedule.

Local supplier Repco rebrands the Century product. The original terminal covers still fit.

In this graph the car's BMS cell-balancing functions follow traction-battery charging, reliant on the 12V battery. You can see how much less the AGM is drawn down than the OEM Rocket.

 

My original factory Rocket battery is still absolutely fine, no issues whatsoever after 3.5y.

However if I was going to replace it, I would 100% agree with the Yuasa recommendation above. Except that it is available somewhat cheaper (5Y warranty) from TAYNA with very fast delivery……
YBX5012 Yuasa Silver High Performance Car Battery 12V 54Ah HSB012
I have used TAYNA before and their service is truly excellent.

or if you prefer, Halfords sell the identical battery (but HSB own branding) at around £20 more!……

Yuasa HSB012 Silver 12V Car Battery 5 Year Guarantee | Halfords UK

Shop the latest Power your ride with the Yuasa HSB012 Silver 12 V car battery—54 Ah capacity, 500 A cold-cranking amps, over 50,000 engine starts, plus a 5‑year guarantee. Fully charged, maintenance-free, with a rollover‑proof lid and ready to fit. Ideal for multiple plug-in devices. at Halfords UK

www.halfords.com

Benefit of Halfords could be easy no quibble warranty replacement at any Halfords branch, should it fail within 5Y. Providing you have the receipt with you.

If DIY, it’s. Easy, just be mega careful to connect it right way around! Red to + etc. even a one second accidental reversed polarity connection would do untold damage to the car! If you have Halfords guy fit it, watch like a hawk before he connects it to ensure correct polarity connection! I would not trust their technicians as far as I could throw them.

Either way, after installing the new battery, when you get home, put the car into utility mode for a good few hours to give it a good start in its life. They come pre charged, but not at the ideal 100% SOC that you want it to be at.

Whatever you do, don’t buy a 12V battery from the Kia dealer. They are much more expensive and only come with a puny 1 or 2y warranty IIRC!

HTH. Peter.

ps Edit. Yuasa batteries come with a lead sleeve on the posts so as to accommodate larger diameter tapered connections if needed. Simply pry them off with a flat blade screwdriver as the sleeves won’t be required in this application.

 

ive never paid attention to my battery before but this morning i filled up the washer fluid and noticed my battery is a HALFORDS one!! 2020 eniro i bought late last year.....so looks like the battery has been replaced already. Not sure if this is good or bad news!?

 

Probably good news. Did you get a receipt for it with the car as it has a better warranty than a Kia replacement.

 

Car batteries virtually always have a manufacturing date code on them (Sometimes obvious sometimes not). So even without the receipt it should presumably be still warranted? Halfords always claim no quibble on their warranty marketing blurb.
Does it state on the battery label a warranty length in years? Even the very cheapest Halfords ones should be 3y I think. Many are 4y or even 5y. Might be worth investigating now, just in case. Cheers. Peter

 

Thanks for the recommendations.
I have a old obd 2 I used to use for monitoring charging level, when the majority of chargers didn't let you know or didn't have a app. Can I use this to monitor the 12v battery levels, if do what app can I use.

 

... I have a old obd 2 I used to use for monitoring charging level, .... Can I use this to monitor the 12v battery levels, if do what app can I use.

Not very usefully because the 12V system including the battery is supported by the traction battery whenever the car is powered up enough to supply OBD data. You need a BM2 battery monitor.

If you want to check OBD data anyway use Car Scanner.

 

Thanks KiwiME, do you have one fitted, after a little research on here, a few people have issues with the data collection and gaining history from the app, they just give live data, or data for a day.

 

I have two with different branding and both use the same app providing data logging. The QR code should take you to a website which points you to the relevant app store, which this one does - the cheapest I could find on Amazon UK.

 

Looks OK, thanks, but delivery not until May ??
There are hundreds that all look the same but most from China ??

 

Anybody fitted a battery monitor to a E Niro FE, there are plastic covers over both - and +. There is a gap on the - so I can thread it underneath, but the + the plastic cover covers it all so no gap to get the + wire in. ??

 

It's the same on the Niro EV, I guess. I just fed it through an area where it would go and it gets pinched. It's not ideal but it works OK.

 

OK, but I can't see a place it will thread through, the plastic top clips over all of the + connection, with a small space near where the cables come up from, but not big enough for it to thread through the monitor cable.

 

Mine's a 21 plate, and I think I had to cut a notch in the plastic cover to allow the wire to go though. It was a while a ago, but I remember it was a bit messy.

 

Yesh I have wondered if I need to do that, but reluctant to do it.

 

I snipped a notch on my 2020……. the day it was delivered brand new. Easy no big deal IMHO. Peter.

 

Thanks prawlin. Any chance you can post a picture, of which part you snipped and how you attatched the monitor lead. Wondering if i can connect the monitor lead to the small nut on both - and + that is uppermost on the battery connection.

 

OP, on the Ioniq forum members are discussing ohmmu aux battery. It's a LFP 12v alternative. Seems to come with various car profiles to match performance.

 

So fitted my monitor and seems to be working OK on the bm2 app. Couple of newbie questions, as I know next to nothing about monitoring a battery and battery levels. What should a normal battery sit at, is it the obvious 12.5, what is classed as low. Anybody using the bm2 app, can I alter the low level warning, that give me a warning notification on when the level drops to a certain level and if so, whats a good low setting. Thanks in advance.

 

... as I know next to nothing about monitoring a battery and battery levels. ...

If you figure out how to post 24-hour-duration screenshots off your phone, others can probably point out any concerning details.

Here's a typical day for my Kona, noting that the 12V charging schedule is probably different to the Niro but otherwise these cars are electrically nearly identical.

These are very healthy 12V battery voltages but I'll note that my example does not have telematics (Hyundai BlueLink) so you won't see the accompanying jiggles.

Data is recorded every 2 minutes so sometimes short events are missed. Notable on the graph below is that the two short 3km drives take a toll on the 12V battery charge that is not recovered until the next scheduled charge.

 

In normal circumstances, the 12V should sit in the 12.9 to 12.6 range. If the 12V is charging, it should be above 14V when doing that.

I find on my bm2 monitoring that there's a steady drop from 12.9 to 12.6 over the day, but then I do poll the car every 6 hours (so 4 times a day) via automation to check the status etc which creates a blip on the 12V as this is a full check so the car 'wakes up' a bit more.
Every day the 12V is charged, usually once it drops and stays below 12.6.
And of course, the 12V is charged whenever you charge the HV battery (AC or DC charging).

That is at least what happens on my Niro EV.

I put the bm2 on because of the horror stories that were going around at the time. I've had zero problems with the 12V as the newer Niro EV seems to manage this so much better than the first-generation Niro or indeed the EV6. I've no idea how the Hyundai equivalent cars manage this, but I guess I'll find out as I'm swapping over to an Ioniq 6 in a couple of weeks.

 

Well think it's new battery time, this morning it's at 6.1v, doors will open,but won't start, trying to get it going by jump kit but struggling to get it connected. Not really confident to buy one and fit self as all the stuff around the connections looks awkward. I can only find halfords who will fit one locally and its there own brand as the yausa one is oos

 

Very strange, drop of a cliff power loss. I can only presume it was the boot as I had it open for 10/15 mins whilst I loaded it up. ??

 

Well, managed to attach the jumper and get it started, put into utility mode and straight away up the battery level went. Anybody know what is going on, now in a quandry, do i need a new battery. ??

 

do i need a new battery?

Probably: the usual progress towards battery end-of-life is that its capacity decreases, so that a small load for a short time which has little effect on a fully-charged new battery has a large (10x as much) effect on running down a nearly-finished battery. But probably, not certainly.

You should expect utility mode (or driving) to bring up the battery voltage to 14 or 15 V quite quickly if it starts low. There's a techy description in Wikipedia as IUoU charging. That's not itself a sign of either a good or a bad 12V battery. A very rapid drop from 15V to float charge at around 13 to 14 V can be the sign of a small capacity (i.e. a knackered battery). Your graph stops too soon to see that drop; it's the change from the Uo phase to U. The very fast rise to 15V suggests the I phase is very short, which is a sign of a reduced capacity, but not proof the battery is too far gone to last another year.

If connecting a substantial load such as an inverter to run power tools, yes, it's important to connect to chassis rather than negative battery pole. It makes hardly any difference for the tiny constant load of a BM2 monitor.

And back to the question - if it were mine, and that battery 2+ years old, after a voltage drop as deep as that, I'd replace it. Even though that might not be needed yet.

 

One point about these BM2 monitors is that the negative lead should not be connected to the 12v battery negative post, but instead, it should go to a nearby suitable point on the car's chassis. Most cars these days have an extra sensor on the battery negative post that feeds battery condition information to the main computer system. If anything else is attached there it could disturb the quality of the information and confuse the system leading to charging sessions outside the main settings. Moving the lead to a chassis point does not affect the BM2 itself so nothing is lost by accepting this techy advice.

 

Thanks Mark. I am leaning towards changing it. This is the latest. The sudden drop is when i was loading car
this morning. Jumped it and into utility mode, then drove it till just before 12 then parked up for a few hours, about 2.30 it started OK and i drove home, arrived home just before 3pm, then placed in utility mode until about 6pm, when car turned of and plugged in to charge tonight.
Rove

 

You should renew the 12V battery, at least to eliminate that as a problem. Although the behaviour doesn't seem out of place after 11:00 hours, the behaviour prior to that the drop is evidence that something is wrong. When you connected your jump pack the voltage recovered just as quickly so I'm thinking it's the battery.
I happened to have the boot open for a while yesterday with the effect seen below - just a blip.

Regarding connecting the BM2 negative to the chassis, I tried that experimentally for about 4 weeks and recently decided to put it back onto the battery negative post. I didn't detect any change in the car's 12V charging behaviour but was seeing occasional small artifacts of roughly 0.1V in the BM2 graphs due to voltage drop whenever the sampling caught a momentary high-current event. Since I installed the BM2 specifically to monitor the battery I prefer to avoid intentionally introducing errors.

 

Thanks everyone, thnk i will swap the battery to be on the safe side.

 

In this case it does look like a bad battery or maybe a loose or dirty terminal connection to the battery. Are you certain that when you added the BM2 that you properly tightened the terminals? If one was left a bit loose it could cause this very rapid Voltage drop effect Under load.
Get a Yuasa with the 5Y warranty! TAYNA are very good suppliers and good pricing. Peter