J.R.

VCDS. Yes. No one specific code, you have to interpret the information from all the fault codes. Yes.

Thats what it is being used for now and probably why the person had it arrive unsolicited in their letter box probably with some bumph about how they could become a millionaire through (decieving) their friends who would in turn become millionaires............................. If you Google it you will see that the name and company was sold on then after that company went bust one of the marketting leeches started reselling it, there was a court case where it came out that it was just another snake oil and had nothing in common with the original formulation, probably a good thing! but the guy did not have the right to use the name, since then it has been used as a vehicle to dupe people into multi-level marketting = Pyramid selling. google reveals all and will correct the errors in my recall.

Are you asking if cast alloy spokes can be welded to a steel rim? If so the short definitive answer is no.

Maybe there has been a misunderstanding Kareem, can you explain what you meant by the above comment please? Nothing you have subsequently said (which should have been explained at the outset) suggests that the aircon guy has removed the refrigerant or that the system has leaked its refrigerant, why do you say it contains pressurised air and not R134a? If the guy used the manifold set and the system was filled with sufficient refrigerant then he would have first seen a low side pressure on both guages, say 125psi but it depends on temperature, then when the aircon cut in the low side should drop and the high side go up as the compressor works, again the values depend on temperature but also in this case humidity, from memory the high side needs to go above 200psi for the fans to cut in.

@Colin170CR I am replying to your comments before the postings might get deleted. AC neighbour is at new house where I will indeed be installiing a ducted system with his knowledge and help. The reversible system is at my appartment in the empty hôtel 800kms away. Thanks again for your help. If you are happy to and enjoy imparting your knowledge then perhaps start a thread with a suitable title, that way the valuable info wont risk being deleted for having offended someone who given where they live probably will one day have need of it themselves. The Brico-sheds sell systems to the public but either including the cost of a commissioning visit from an authorised dealer who will simply say "we don't cover your area" or you have to get a purchase authorsation from someone like my neighbour who will do the commissioning.

That is not right, Colins expertise has been of great help to people, start another thread using the content if need be. JR RS did not create the thread, even if he did he dose not own it or cannot dictate what direction it takes after 128 pages, why is he getting so upset about thread drift when it is this wonderful community helping each other?

I have compromised vision and a crap computer monitor but the figure looks like 3.3g and not 33g. Or is that just another example of the VCDS ****witted use of values? Editted, I see you were referring to the first image. Thanks for the tip about hovering over the value, that is really good info 👍

I will give you a couple of nuggets to reflect on and then maybe the penny will drop with you. The fans will only cut in when the AC pump raises the pressure of the liquid refrigerant above the threshold, they should not cut in as soon as you press the AC switch, the pump has to compress the liquid and bring it up to the threshold pressure. Liquids are incompressible. Air is compressible 💡 R134a is pumped in the liquid state and expands to the gas state in the evaporator creating cooling, I've kept that bit simple it is only to illustrate that a refrigerant gas goes between the two states. If your name was Ian and not Kareems I would think you were the muppet that I tried in vain to explain why it was stupid to pump up the hydrolastic suspension on his girlfriends Mini with a garage airline, I tried but failed, hopefully you will be more receptive. You have now contaminated your system with moisture from the compressed air, the filter drier will need replacing and the system dried with several long vacuum downs. Had you in fact resolved the issue which caused you to be working on and ultimately screw up the AC system?

Steel wheels yes, I have done some myself but you wanted to cut & weld your Tecnomagnesio alloy wheels which is an absolute no-no in my book.

You are proposing to let a mechanic cut through the cast wheel spokes and then weld them to the rim set further back. You might want to ask a coded welder whether he would do such a thing and then be liable for someone driving his work on the highways. I think I already know the answer.

I would definitely replace the bump stops with the new springs, you should not feel the bump stop coming into operation, its not a stop but effectiveky an auxiliary buffer spring, I reckon that yours are shot and the shock absorber was compressing to its limit effectively like an axle striking the chassis, the spring rate becomes infinity, the vehicle has solid suspension.

Cut them down if you dont like them! They may settle anyway. The ones I fitted to my MK2 Octavia Estate did raise it but given the overloading it endurered it was not a problem to me, the ride and handling were just fine but I did need to use my drop plate on the towbar for most of my trailers but the towbar was always too high at standard ride height, it came with the car so I dont know the reason. I am not concerned with the cosmetic image of my vehicle, but someone with an already low VRS with big wheels & skinny tyres tucked into the wheelarches might not like the raised ride height on cosmetic grounds. The guy I sold the car too kicked off saying it was too high and had worn out the rear tyres (they had 5mm of tread and had just passed the CT test) and was fishing for some money back but would not come out with it, I just kept repeating "what is it that you want from me?" and he eventually hung up. He bought it for towing his trailer and knew I was using a drop plate, I reckon he could not find one himself.

I reckon you can view the crank sensor output using "live data".

Thanks for the clear and concise explanation. Lets say it did not have the equity like the Fabia, how do you "trade in" a vehicle that you dont own? Do you mean just choose a new vehicle and start all over again with a new deposit and new payments? Financially that would be the same hit as handing it back and walking away. I guess were there not the equity you would have done that with the Fabia and it would have cost you £12504 for having a vehicle for 4 years, whether you look at it as depreciation or hire costs. £260 per month.

You can spend all day trying to find & buy the alleged Mad air suspension for your vehicle & it always leads you back to helper springs, I realise that I have been down that wormhole before, I dont think that they exist. Dont use helper springs, they are a bodge and your springs are clapped. I have never found any compromise with using higher rate rear springs on these vehicles, only positives, they are ridiculously undersprung for the UK market, yours more than most.

Thankyou so much for that Colin, I had theorised that the 4 way valve (not 5 port 😳) worked like that and that the testing etc would be in that manner but its good to know from a pro before my enthusiasm & ignorance caused a problem. As you can probably tell I am an enthusiastic amateur & do not have the gas qualification although its something I intend to do as a retirement business. I have a vacuum pump but not the means of recovering the gas, is that something which can be DIY'ed? If so can the gas then be re-used or is it simply for storage prior to recycling? I would imagine that you would need seperate pumps, storage cylinders, hoses & manifold sets for each gas to avoid contamination, my neighbour is an installer & he only works with one, maybe 2 modern gases although he has offered to recover the R22 from an old system in my new house (he's a new neighbour to me at my new house). I could braze in a valve but dont have the nitrogen to prevent oxidisation, I understand the need. I agree with not repairing it if it needs gassing down, as it is still cooling and I rarely spend time the property now I will keep it but the heating was very usefull at the beginning and end of the winter period as the main heating is storage heaters which are useless when the temperatures are fluctuating, the heating function of the aircon came into its own then and I could have used it all winter as the off peak electricity prices are no longer a real saving.

I did laugh when I read "This should be standard no? at least it is on mine"

That is not the way to set up headlamp alignment. You may not dazzle a driver 6 car lengths away but could well at a greater distance, Halfords already set them above the regulatory angle, probably close to zero, you may now have gone positive. (UK) Dipped beam headlights should light up the left hand verge and road signs etc but not the right, I presume you were talking about that because from your own photos its clear that both sides of the tarmac were illuminated. I would not count on that but testers usually will readjust FOC. A night-time photograph would be more revealing but the brighly illuminated area on that one is far more than 5-7m ahead of the vehicle. I can understand your logic regarding the bumper height at 30m away being probably 30cm lower than the headlight beam but I think the issue is you seeing a very sharp defined cut off line which LED headlight certainly have and thinking that there is no illumination beyond that, if you turn your lights off and on you would realise that a lot more is being illuminated including oncoming drivers eyes if it is set too high, your iris is adjusting to the almost blinding reflection from the tarmac and its difficult to see the images in the less illuminated zone. I think LED headlights are far too bright on dipped beam, I say this as a driver of the oncoming vehicle and also as a passenger in LED equipped vehicles, also having recently had cataract surgery and now having 100% of the daylight or illuminated light getting through to the retina like when I was a child I definitely see that they are far too bright, even DRL's now look like someone is reflecting the sun with a parabolic reflector. The UK Construction and Use regulations still use watts and not lumens, had that mistake not been made LED headlights would be not significantly brighter than halogen ones, same deal for brake lights especially the high level ones which are blinding, they should have to face down at 15°, for some crazy reason car designers in recent years have taken away the yellow indicator lens, made the size of the clear or smoked lens so small that even a moped rider would get pulled by the law with something so small and they have also massively reduced the light output from them to the extent that you cannot see them over the rear lights or DRL's. Someone in power really needs to get a grip with what is happening.

Does yours heat as well? IE is it a reversible heat pump? Does it work in heating mode but not refrigeration? My unit is about the same year and has stopped heating but still works on cooling, I believe my problem is what I call a 5 port valve that is not actuating. @Colin170CR Do you have any advice for me? I have yet to go looking inside the external unit, I will check the fuses etc and give the valve a few encouraging taps, what else could I do to find the fault, I have a manifold guage for car aircon and the correct adaptor to check the pressure but I dont think its a loss of refrigerant because the cooling function works. My gas is either R407 or R410, it was bought around 2007 cheap as the gas was being phased out, its the type that came precharged and you opened valve to purge out the air in the connection pipes, the last of the flared union type before they went to the leaky dry break ones that nobody wants to work on. Did you know that the flaring tool is called une Dugeonnaire in French, a weird word even in French which sounded like it was based around an English name so I did some searching and fell down the wormhole of an 18th century Scottish engineer called Richard Dudgeon, the inventor of the hydraulic jack, boiler pipe roller flaring tools, hydraulic punches ans shears and one of the first steam powered road vehicles which was ahead of its time.

Nope, clear as mud. I'm thick as mud as well which is probably the reason for the lack of clarity. I wont lose sleep over it though!

There are no leaks per sé on a domestic system like there are on a vehicle with flexible hoses, the pipes are copper with either swaged or soldered joints, think of it as a domestic fridge which never need topping up. The exception is those sold for DIY installs with precharged extension pipes (usually partially discharged by inquisitive people in the DIY sheds) with dry break type couplings, these have O ring seals and its not a question of if they will leak but how quickly. I cant make out from the label on your unit what gas it uses, it looks old so might be R22 Freon in which case you will have to throw away the unit.

Regarding the Japanese being too late to the party, reckon that is their intended strategy. I have been closely scrutinising Japanese cars since the 70's and their business practices and model since the late 80's, they have never been innovators but sit back and let others get burned with their innovative new features that become achilles heels and are usually dropped, some while later a Japanese manufacturer will introduce that feature without the fanfare and it will work faultlessly as all their systems do the result of patient design, testing and manufacture. I can think of loads of quite benign things like a drum brake self adjust mechanism first used on Fiats that seemed a good idea but was rubbish in practice, a decade later it appeared on a Datsun and was faultless. I reckon they will do the same with EV's and be the first real serious competitors to Tesla, I doubt we will see any public activity for a decade but you can be sure that they are already well on the journey, given the speed of innovation and progress in the EV market that 10 years will probably be 5 years. Japanese, Korean and even Chinese EV's will be the long term winners I reckon, like me they play the long game.

I agree, my apologies, I would have ignored it had it not gained momentum.

That depends on what government you are speaking of. I'm not sure what our highest diesel price would have been without the governments 30cts rebate at the pump intervention and the 15cts they managed to persuade Total Energies to deduct as well under threat of windfall taxes. Our electricity was allowed to go up by 5% rather than the 34% that EDF wanted which was still far less than the market rate would have been, we now pay 20.62 cts per kwh = about 18p, off peak is relatively expensive at 16.15cts = 14p, these prices are fixed for a year, future increases are not likely to be any higher as 5% was far more than any previous increase and brought the strikers to the streets. Did the UK government subsidise the cost of road fuel during the high period and also the cost of electricity?

Thats like being shocked that water evaporates, unless you had been in a cave for the last couple of decades what else would you expect? So it's no longer Boris that "persuaded the majority of the U.K. population of this little island, which has no manufacturing industries to speak of, no oil, no gas, old and completely dilapidated infrastructures of every type, which relies on a few foreign-owned financial and service businesses, private banks and its mortgaged housing stock to prop-up its economy, that they’d all be better-off being outside one of the the worlds largest trading economies." but those who did not bother to inform themselves then. That is called democracy. When will you stop counting the months and years?