Herbie

I fitted a GPS tracker to my car. Nothing fancy, no central monitoring or police tracking etc., but it was just under £45 and costs about £60/year for the data SIM. It gives live tracking data so if it gets stolen I can call the police and tell them exactly where it is, how fast it's going and so on. In fact, I'm blown away by just how much information it gives, not least of which is a page dedicated to showing info from six different sensors, amongst which is the vehicle 12V battery status, as shown in the screengrab below.

I'm not sure if it's for safety reasons or to protect the electronics but this can't be done because there are two 12V relays that act as a low-voltage interlock. If there isn't enough 12V power to operate this then the hybrid system cannot start and so can't charge the 12V battery. I do agree with that - it should be trivial for them to do this.

Not as long as you're mindful that all vents need to be kept clear at all times.

Just spotted this article and thought it interesting. We all know that winter can be hard on batteries but we usually speak in terms of the standard 12V item. It's going to be very different when the whole car is powered purely by batteries:

Cheers Mikey, that was it - just not holding the stalk up long enough

I've looked at four different Youtube videos and they all demonstrate the same procedure as below - but my car doesn't do it Foot NOT on the brake. First press of power button turns on 'Accessory mode'. Second press doesn't turn things off, it turns ON the ignition. No amount of pressing buttons or lifting stalks will make the wipers stand up and stay there.

Option 1 is the logical choice. You'll probably have to take out the fuse box to do it as I think the 'rail' (which is the actual fuse) is bolted in from underneath, but there's no need to go to the expense of replacing the whole box.

Have a look at this video - definitely the best way of doing it:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Viktor+G+Automotive

Just PM'd you Peter.

To be honest Paul, it looks a lot worse than it actually is. The multimedia head unit has two 10mm bolts holding it in and there are two Philips head screws under the joystick unit and that's about it; everything else just uses clips. There are quite a few videos out there showing how to get the head unit in/out but the 'extra' things are easy enough. Open the armrest lid and pull the power/USB board towards the rear to unclip that and remove the connectors. The joystick unit pulls up at the back and then slides toward the rear. Then use the shift lock to move the gear lever back and unscrew the knob, put your hand under the back of that section and pull towards the rear; then it's all just a matter of manipulating it so that you can unclip the connectors and that's it. And yes, it all went back without a single rattle anywhere And a very Happy New Year to you and yours my friend.

I think I can answer that Gaurav but it'll be good if anyone can confirm. 1. It's possible, although I don't know for sure, that the warranty may be voided on the infotainment unit but certainly not the whole car. 2. Like you, I watched a few videos and like them, I didn't disconnect the battery. I don't know if it's 'good practice' to do so but they didn't and neither did I. I can imagine that it would seem off-putting to anyone without some electrical knowledge but honestly, you won't go wrong. All you're doing is disconnecting things from the multimedia haed unit, diverting them to the new unit (be it Grom or something else) and then from the new unit back again. All the connectors are either shaped, keyed or coloured so you can't get them mixed up.

Have a look at this post I made earlier today:

Probably blown the big main fuse. Although I don't know the 220D I'll hazard a guess that it's a long thing, maybe the whole length of the fuse box and will have a rating of about 180A. If I'm right, the fuse box usually needs to come out to replace these because they're bolted in from the underside. Only a guess.

Just PM'd you Phil.

As some of you are aware, I bought one of these units back around the end of October but had lots of problems with it, all of which were due to a faulty main wiring harness. Thankfully it's all sorted now and working brilliantly, so I thought I'd do a quick demo video. I know it's not brilliant but you'll get the gist of it and it may be enough to give someone that final impetus if they've been thinking of getting one. It seems that a lot of people mount the unit in the glove box but we didn't want to lose that space, so I decided to put it in the 'spare' space under the centre console lift-out tray. The unit itself fits nicely in there and the tray doesn't interfere with it at all, but it's a bit of a faff getting access to run the wiring. Initially I thought it would be easy enough to get the side panel off but I discovered that you have to go in through the top of the console to do that, but doing that gives good access anyway and negates the need to remove the side panel. The green/yellow wire is what I used as a draw wire to get the harness where I wanted it to be, simply by taping the harness connector to the wire and feeding it in from the front as I gently pulled it towards the back. This is when I discovered that the harness was just a smidgen too short. It did actually connect to the unit but it was under a bit of strain, so obviously that had to be sorted. There are 13 wires in the harness so I went to CPC and bought this reel of cable to extend the harness with. I know I didn't need a 100m reel but hey, it'll come in handy for something I then cut 13 pieces, each 10" long, and one-by-one I cut each wire of the harness in turn and spliced in the new pieces, soldering and double heat-shrinking each joint. This last photo shows the completed harness with the new length arrowed. This video will give you an insight into how it works and what I think of it. I'm no expert on making videos and commenting on them so I apologise for my less than professional attempt, and also for the moments where the camera autofocus struggles for a second or two and the strobing effect that's sometimes present. I used the camera on an old Xiaomi Redmi phone for the video and it's not done too badly with it.

I know - gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling when something like this works doesn't it? Our Beko washer/dryer recently died; no lights, no actions, no sounds except for a very, very, faint bleeping. A bit of Googling later and I found it was 99% sure to be the printed circuit board, with new ones costing £80. A bit more Googling revealed that it was most likely a diode that had gone for a poo. The photo below is my actual board with the diode arrowed. I live about a mile and a half from https://cpc.farnell.com/ so off I pootled in search of a replacement. Turns out they don't sell them singly so I had to buy a pack of 10 for the huge sum of 40pence including VAT! Once home, armed with the desoldering station and the soldering iron, out came the board and out came the faulty diode. Replacement in, and the end result was a fully working washer/dryer for just 4p and a bit of effort

Wow, that's brilliant Ollie, well done mate. An excellent write-up and a great project.

I think, using that example, you have to imagine a scenario where you have, say, a business voicemail and any messages left on it could be confidential, so you need a pin number to access it. I'm on Sky mobile and have no such need for secrecy, so if someone leaves me a voicemail I just dial the server on 759 and I get to hear the message. I think 'speed tones' are a step further, where you dial 759 and then you have to input a pin number, say 64026 - the speed tones will hold that pin number for you. I'm only guessing but that's all I can come up with.

Surely that's just speed dial? For instance, to call home I just press 1; to call wife's mobile I press 2 and so on. EDIT - ignore my post as I've just seen Peniole's explanation

Forget the power for the moment because quiescent current is usually spoken of in milliamps (mA) rather than Watts. When the car has fully gone to sleep then things like the alarm, entry/exit system, radio presets, clock and so on will still be drawing power to keep them alive and/or in memory. In theory there should be an official figure available from the manufacturers specifications to show what this quiescent current draw should be, or what's considered to be normal for a given model/variant. I've never seen such a figure but I believe that around 50 to 60mA is considered the norm in the auto-electrical industry and anything much above this indicates a fault condition. The battery on my 4RX has a rating of 60Ah (I think - too cold and wet to go outside to confirm), which means that it should be able to provide 60A for 1 hour, 30A for 2 hours and so on. If we assume a brand new and fully charged battery with a quiescent current draw of 0.05A, then 60Ah/0.05A = 1,200 hours or 50 days or 7.14 weeks to go from fully charged to fully discharged if the car isn't used and is left standing. In reality, the battery is unlikely to be brand new and fully charged; plus the battery will not have enough power in it to start the car long before it becomes fully discharged. Going back to my apprenticeship days, if I remember correctly P = V x I, so if a lead-acid battery is considered 100% charged at 12.7V, that's 12.7 x 0.05 = 0.635W. If you're seeing 4W then I = P/V = 4/12.7 = 0.314A instead of something around 0.05A (don't forget though that this calculation is assuming your battery voltage to be 12.7V). If you think you may have a problem then the video below is by far the best way of finding out what it is:

I own a 4RX but got a UX as a courtesy car a while ago. Absolutely horrendous. Being in the UX is like being in a matchbox toy compared with the RX; everything is so cramped up it's ridiculous. Don't do it, you'll be immediately disappointed.

Hope you get better soon Brian. There's a fuse box located in the passenger footwell, just about where the left foot would rest. This often gets soaked because there's a drain pipe also in the same location. Somewhere on here there's an entire topic including pictures but I find the search facility on here absolutely abysmal and can't find it right now. It's well worth a look before you get rid of the car - it may just need drying and cleaning up.

In the absence of a proper torque setting I'd go hand tight plus a quarter turn with the spanner.

This should help: https://www.toyodiy.com/parts/q.html