Having bought a new battery (current one not too happy in the cold!) I've realised - embarrasingly - I can't actually get the old one out...

Having undone everything visible (not as seen in photos, these were taken after I had to reconnect the old battery), the battery is stuck underneath the cowl panel grill as shown in the third photo.

What's the best way to proceed, should I remove the cowl panel? I'm sure when I was looking into this (unfortunately nothing useful on YouTube), I saw one guide that suggested removing everything in front of the battery.

All advice gratefully received... winter is coming!

The front of the box should pull up and off.

Sent from my SM-G965F (S9+)

First remove the air filter housing , the front of the battery box assembly, the battery bracket/strap and disconnect the battery terminals. Next the battery can easily be slided out of the battery box.

 

Thanks for the info guys.

I take it removing the air filter housing is pretty straightforward?

I found this on how to remove the filter, but it looks like the housing is still in place and would get in the way of removing the battery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS0yeKX07w

29 minutes ago, FocusingPhil said:

Thanks for the info guys.

I take it removing the air filter housing is pretty straightforward?

I found this on how to remove the filter, but it looks like the housing is still in place and would get in the way of removing the battery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS0yeKX07w

Should be very straightforward. If it's anything like the one on my 1.6tdci there's just a couple of clips/slots and you just pull the whole box upwards. You may need to remove the concertina pipe bit but that's just attached to the air box by a jubilee clip (to the left of the air box in your photo).  You shouldn't need to open the air filter housing at all.  Just do it carefully as there's a pipe attached to mine that i snapped off once!  And there may be a sensor with a red clip to undo. 

For the benefit of anyone finding this in future... I finally got this done, and without removing the air filter housing.

This video - for a Mk3 - mostly shows how I did it, the design is similar if not identical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUfNFdBEi2E

Except I found that with the front panel of the battery box just tilted forward as in the video, there still wasn't quite enough space to get the battery out. Maybe that was just me not wrangling well enough, I'm not sure.

What I did was lift out the front panel of the battery box altogether, rather than just tilt the panel forward, and that gave me plenty of room to do the job. To do this, I first had to lift out the cables held in by the hooks on the panel.

The one gotcha - after swapping the batteries, when I was clipping the cables back into the front panel of the battery box, I thought I had split the sheathing around the bundle of wires from the fuse box. Then I realised it's actually just a cable tidy to keep the wires together, and it has a split all the way down it. So don't panic and think you need to make it watertight, as I did at that point.

No idea why they had to put the battery in such an awkward place, I assumed it would be a trivial job but I wouldn't bother doing it myself in future. At least on the Mk2.5 having the battery disconnected doesn't seem to screw anything up (apart from the radio, which I had the code for anyway).