Originally Posted by
rjsdavis
Sorry to hear of your illness. Hope you're feeling better...
Made some progress, but it's not resolved.
It went into an auto-electrician specialist no less than three times. The first time, he had it for a day, charged me £216 for about four hours labour, and diagnosed it as being the amp that was water damaged and needed replacing. He asked me to acquire a replacement, which I did, and it went back.
Visit No. 2, he fitted the new amp, and after another 4 hours or so of doing whatever he was doing, gave it back and asked me to get a new radio receiver. I did this, and arranged to go back a third time. When I took the car back after the second visit, he left the MMI system completely disconnected (the stack in the boot), which cut off the screen in the dash too. It was clear that whilst the MMI system was disconnected, the battery drain problem stopped.
Visit No. 3, he fitted the new radio receiver, and after a further 4-5 hours of waiting, handed the car back stating that he was completely happy that it was now shutting down properly and was sorted.
Drove the car away. It wasn't sorted. All of the speakers on the right-hand side of the car now no longer worked! He informed me that he was able to watch the car shutdown, by watching the sat-nav DVD player stopped lighting up, and also watching the hazard warning light shut off. He informed me that these were indicators that the car was now "shut down". He informed me that the hazard warning light went off within a few minutes.
That evening, I watched the hazard light after I locked the car. It didn't go off. After ten minutes I was bored with watching it and came back periodically. After this, and all subsequent drives, I can see that it takes approximately 2 hours for the hazard light to go off and consequently the car to actually shut down. I've made the electrician aware that he hasn't fixed the fault at all, and his response was "that's strange!".
So, my car is actually worse than when he started tinkering with it. I've paid him a load of labour, and ordered new amp and new radio receiver. I've also found new fault codes that have never appeared before - ever, after I took her back after Visit No. 3. Namely short/open circuits in the aerial (I presume the amplified aerial that sits above the stack in the same bay?).
So - I'm fairly ****** about it to be honest. It's seemingly clear that the stack in the boot is the root cause. Its seems to be clear that the electrician doesn't appear to know what he's doing, and was simply going through it "piecemeal" by eliminating things (at my cost) sequentially until he stumbled over a fix.
The battery drain is now slightly different, insofar, that it doesn't completely drain the system. It would appear, from what I can determine, that the two hours or so after shut-down drains the battery for this two hour period, and that the drain stops after the car finally shuts down. Therefore, I now find, that when I go back to the car, whether it's one day or three/four days later, the battery is always at 60% of charge according to the battery meter on the car. The car always starts now, and doesn't give me any "low battery" warnings - with the exception of if you make the fatal error of opening/locking the car without driving of charging it, and then leaving it to sit.
Therefore, if you park up and leave the car, it will continue to take two hours to shut down and the battery will discharge to around 60%. If I were to open the car to get something out of it, and then lock it up again, the car would then take another two hours to shut down and this would take the residual battery down to about 10%. It still, just, starts and I'll get a low battery warning in this circumstance. The car will need a good run or specific charging to resolve it. If the battery is allowed to drop to around the 10% mark, it will log the quiesecent error codes as before.
Therefore, something is still causing a drain. I'm going to order a replacement amplified aerial, fit it, and see if this makes a difference. Just found one on eBay. I can see that there water marks on the cabling leading into the aerial, so it looks like it might have got wet when the rear washer-wiper was leaking which is probably the root cause of all of this blinking rigmarole! Will update if the replacement aerial resolves the issue...
What would you do about the electrician? Grin and bear it? Just let it go and put it down to experience?
Also - got to resolve the missing sound from the right-hand side of the car. Would be lucky if he's simply been incompetent and simply didn't connect everything back up together properly, but I don't know.