J.R.

Thanks for that, every day is a school day for me. This is very clear and the penny dropped immediately: A possible fault condition in a PME system occurs when due to a break in the PEN conductor the home appliances appear dead. However, if a device is turned ON, the neutral will rise to the live potential, and so too will earth as this is also connected to the house neutral. Under this fault condition, RCDs no longer provide fault protection. This however raised my eyebrows: Inside the home, the danger is low as no potential difference exists between the live, neutral and earth conductors to do any harm. However, if a vehicle is connected to the chargepoint and earthed inside the home, this provides high risk of electric shock due to the potential difference between vehicle chassis and external ground. If a person stood on the ground touches the vehicle chassis, they could complete the earth’s path to ground and experience an electric shock. Whilst there is no PD between L, N & E during the fault condition they are all at 235 VAC potential, touching any earthed metal casing (a heater or light fitting for instance) would result in the person getting a shock to ground, this is not limited to an EV on charge. Or have I missed something? Here in France we use the earth rod system and not PME.

Can you expand on that or do you have a source for your claim? I am assuming that the connector has an earth terminal, the earth conductor section on a T + E cable is less than the live and neutral but enough to ensure that any fault current will not create a voltage above the required threshold before the circuit breaker trips. That is why it does not need to be the same cross section. In any case with an upstream RCD device in the fuseboard earthing is pretty much irrelevant. My word I am really struggling to find the correct terms in English for electrical items, its not as if its a new trade I have learned since leaving the UK (like dry lining for instance) where I may only have known the French terms, it was my business!!

Not a good time with only a one pound and fifty pence deposit contribution!

Then you dont know very far but have an active imagination.

Nonsense. To extend the effective range of a 433mhz central locking keyfob put it under your chin and touch it to the flesh of the neck before pressing the button, it sounds crazy but really does work and I can only speculate as to why. It also works with garage door, gate controllers etc, maybe also on the 868mhz frequency ones, I have not tried.

Yes assuming that the cable is 6mm T + E which it looks to be and that it is correctly wired and protected upstream at the fuseboard which we can't see.

I never knew that there was a search function in VCDS measuring blocks, I have gone goggle eyed scrolling through thousands of parameters and opening ones of interest only to find they were not applicable for my vehicle. I also found some were repeated under different codes.

I missed the first k in 2-3k kms and mistakenly thought the problem happened within 2kms. If you drove 2-3000 kms before having any problem it is unlikely that they drained the diff oil by mistake. So just bad luck.

Whoever did the Haldex service has drained your differential of oil and not the Haldex fluid. You wont need to strip the diff to find out what has happened, it is toast, you were unlucky that it failed so quickly, I hope for your sake it was done by a garage and you have some recourse. I made the mistake despite checking very carefully and having a second experienced pair of eyes (I'm partially sighted) I was really really lucky because I had driven over 400 miles with no diff lubrication, the last 200 on UK motorways and French autoroutes at 70/80 mph and heavily laden, that was when the noise became apparent. I filled the diff with oil and parafin, ran it for 10 miles, flushed it and did the same again, the few drops of oil that came out were black and carbonised, I refilled with the correct oil and have since driven 40K miles over close to 3 years, its noisy but no worse than it was, I am tempting fate by saying so but I dodged a bullet. These differentials are incredibly strong and reliable, just look at the abuse mine survived, whenever I read of a failure it has always been preceeded by a haldex fluid change where the wrong drain plug is used, it's very easily done and if you did not know otherwise you would swear that it was the correct drain plug.

If they have fitted a SMF then they were making extra profit at your expense. It can easily be verified by removing the starter motor.

Noise will not be the Haldex coupling but the differential gears and bearings, your description allowing for it being in a second language sounded like that. Had someone changed the Haldex oil not long before the noise started by any chance?

The garage replaced your DMF with an SMF, you are now hearing the resultant clatter from the laygear and the free running gears meshed with it. Thats my diagnosis based on what you have said and assuming that you have a 6 speed probably 02M gearbox.

Roller rockers alone wont be too bad if the camshaft is not damaged but they are likely to have become damaged because there has been valve to piston contact meaning bent valves which is a lot more costly. Then you have to find a way to properly repair the bodged tensioner pivot bolt, I suspect this might be the biggest obstacle time and effort wise but not moneywise. I would repair it if I could afford to but only if I was 100% sure of my repair to the damaged thread, no way would I want to bend a set of new valves.

It doesn't, nor does it mention "that funny little yellow light thingy" either!

Doesn't the pump prime when you cycle the ignition switch? I'm pretty sure that mine did and when I rechecked the level as a precaution after a test drive it could not take any more fluid. This was of course after learning the hard way which hole is which! 😳

What are you actually inspecting for daily? Perhaps the Fuse Fairies that removed Hobartians fuse?

Mon dieu!

If all this happened within a few minutes of starting from cold then it sounds quite normal to me, the engine would have barely produced enough heat to defrost the screen and but for the sliding sleeve waterpump you would not have been getting any significant heat for 5 miles or so (I dont know if the VRS is a diesel). There is also the fudge factor of the temp guage where it would indicate 90° from 71° upwards, you may have been nudging 70° on the non circulating warm up coolant circuit the taken a big chunk of heat away using the demister set to 25°, that would cause the indicated temperature display to drop much further tha the real temperature drop because of the fiddle factor. If once the vehicle is properly warmed up and the coolant circulating properly (sliding sleeve withdrawn) if you the get indicated temperature variations from using the heater/demister then something is amiss, probably with the DSG thermostat which is a common failure and I believe easy to replace.

Drivers door? Have you never manually unlocked the drivers door before?

A guess, serviced recently by someone undiscerning to whom one hole is as good as another! 🤣 Am I wrong?

Thats what Fluffers are for! 😆

It might be an error in translation, I suspect he means the radio is 10 years old but may have been fitted more recently, were they even selling Win CE head units 10 years ago? I had exactly the same problem in the same vehicle with the same Win CE head unit, once connected the Canbus system will not go into sleep mode nor the various other modules it communicates with resulting in a half amp or more battery drain. The only solution is to replace the Canbus gateway unit with a later revision one, it will also need reprogramming for the installation list of your vehicle. Plenty of info about it on the Ross-Tech web site.

Does it happen more frequently during the warm up period and rarely when the engine is hot? If so then it will be sticking turbo vanes or actuator or both. A Mr Muscle enema is the magic resolution!

I have my own old school manual tyre changing machine, I've used it loads for 13" & 15" trailer tyres but all were metal rims, I have a slow deflation on an alloy rim on my Yeti, it might be a slow puncture, bead leak or maybe a porous rim, none of which scenarios have I ever had a good outcome with at a tyre fitters, due mainly I believe to time pressure, also as the tyres are approaching the wear marker I know that in France they will make up an excuse that the tyre is not repairable and lie and say that the law says that they must replace both tyres on the same axle. So I am going to bite the bullet and see if I can demount and remount the tyre on the manual machine with the lever bar without wrecking the alloy rim, the car is a shed now anyway so not a big deal. It will be ironic that after shelling out to tyre fitters for 30 years plus because they have the machines that supposedly will not damage an alloy rim to find that I do less damage than they frequently do doing mine manually!