rum4mo

SEATs tend to be same, ie at least with RHD cars, the bonnet release is on the passenger side, VW and Audi have them on the driver's side for RHD cars.

No in this weather the cooling fan would not normally be running, I agree with what @TerFarsaid, ie in colder weather when the engine is not being asked to do a lot of work, it will not not be dumping enough waste heat into the coolant to keep up with what you are removing to heat the cabin.

I think that I bit the bullet and spent a bit of time making quite a few "repair washers" to have ready for the next time, beans tins for me too!

Normally only a person or workshop that has fully licensed VW Group diagnostic tooling can carry out this task properly as the car needs to be connected to, in your case, Skoda mothership, if that replacement unit is second hand and not reported stolen then it can be re-assigned to your car.

Yes, it seems like quite a "reasonable" proportion of people with EFB and using their cars for short journeys have ended up needing to replace their EFB, I think that with longer and frequent journeys even these EFBs along with Stop/Start can last lot longer, I'm keeping an eye on the EFB in my wife's 2015 Polo and hopefully find the point when it needs changing before it lets us down. There was also a quality/life issue with some brands over a manufacturing period, I seem to remember that that Polo has an Exide EFB.

Oh, that is not good, so the sensor is in the reservoir, bother that!

I've never ever had any trouble with a VW Group car brake fluid level sensor, but I'd think that it is just a float switch. So, if that is correct, after disconnecting the connector, remove the cover-sensor assembly and connect a DVM across the connector pins and see if moving the float fully up and fully down changes the state of the circuit through the sensor contacts, if it doesn't then you need a new cover-sensor.

I don't think that the inspection period changes, but maybe you didn't mean that it does, so normally Inspection is carried out every other year. With variable servicing, it all depends on how you use the car as the oil change warning could appear after 15Kms or up to 30Kms. Fixed servicing just changes things so that the oil change warning comes at 15Kms or 12months (or maybe even 375 days), many people like to keep the oil change period to a maximum of 15Kms and 365days especially as the car gets older. You know the old saying "oil is the life blood of your engine", maybe not essential but a reasonable way of doing things to help look after your engine. Edit:- my guess at 375days could be wrong, 372days maybe as said earlier!

Oh! Not much good if that outer shell can not stay down in the arm! I don't have an answer though, the usual tool that DIYers buy is for the original or upgraded Golf mounting bush, and it draws the complete original bush assembly down into the arm.

I'd think that your best plan now is, at or before its 4th birthday, get your local dealership to carry out a year 4 service, inspection and brake fluid change, and maybe helpful to include a full wheels off brake service, and maybe even an AC service including gas charge check and pollen filter. Then, if it suits your expected usage, request they change the service scheduling from variable to fixed.

As far as I have read, that charger that you bought from Halfords is a safe smart charger, battery maintenance unit, so it will charge the battery safely while it is connected to the car, and fully charge it and eventually just restart trickle charging when the battery voltage has dropped by a certain level. So like my CTEK chargers, fit and forget if that car is in a garage with power. The reference to the battery only being re-charged up to roughly 75% is how the car looks after its battery, ie attempting to never waste energy/fuel/emissions by keeping it fully charged up - but for my money, getting it fully charged up with a smart charger is a better way to look after these EFB batteries. If the correct/smart VW Group battery post covers have been fitted to that car, the -VE post cover should try to get the message across that always connect to the local body earth post, this originally would mean while carrying out a jump start with another battery, but more recently it also covers any connecting from another power source to a car battery that has a bolted on battery management system dongle. Obviously the +VE post cover will not have any pictorial advice because connecting directly to that post is still the way to do things. Edit:- from my experience of only 2 cars that have stop/start and EFB batteries, the car that has been used most regularly prior to movement restrictions, and never used for extremely short journeys, and is now 5.5 years old, has a battery in much more health than the car that is 1.75 years old and was left relatively used for the first 4 months of its life. So despite what is claimed for EFB batteries, if the car is not used regularly then the battery will age quicker. Also due to lack of use, as soon as I return either of our cars to the garage, they are re-connected to their CTEK smart charger-battery maintenance units - maybe overkill, but it seems to work for me. AGM batteries seem to live a lot longer, my own car is almost 10 years old, but low mileage and spends most of its life sleeping in the garage - and its original AGM battery is still okay but will get replaced this year to try to avoid letting me down when away from home. The second car that has stop/start and an EFB battery is my daughter's and I think that she still connects it up to a CTEK charger/battery maintenance unit "now and again" while lockdown is in place, it will get used once or twice a week to go into work and maybe once a week when necessary, for food shopping - but she can not get that car into their garage so using a charger is only getting done as and when she feels it is necessary.

What lots of people do in this situation is to tap/hammer the rear drums. If you chose to try this, make sure that you have the car in gear and the front wheels blocked so that it can not move on your sloping driveway. Let handbrake lever OFF, find a length of wood that you can reach through the wheels if possible and strike the end of the wood with a hammer a few times aiming to rest the wood on the outer edge of the drum if possible, that should shock the shoes to release. That is exactly what the AA etc would do to get you going - but as said already, these brakes, probably all of them, need to be serviced, so in the case of the rear brakes, drums off and swept surface cleaned back to shiny or slightly grey finish - it will currently have some black areas, all dust removed and shoes and linkage checked that all is still free to move. Lub where appropriate. Edit:- you might even be lucky enough to hear the shoes releasing when tapping the drums hard.

Jurid is what VW fitted to my wife's August 2015 Polo with ATE front brakes (288mm), though I've never ever bought Jurid stuff, I seem to remember that the front pads have VW Group ID on them + ATE + Jurid, so that is why I'm thinking that at least VW Polo got ATE assemblies but ATE got the pads from Jurid. I'm not near the point of needing replace any pads or discs yet, only 34K miles.

@barratt32, does your car have rear disc brakes or rear drum brakes? If it has rear disc brakes you should see the shiny disc swept surface through the wheels, if it has rear drum brakes all you will see is a mid grey or rusty coloured brake drum. Now, if it has rear drum brakes, maybe that car has never ever had its brakes serviced, so as the brake dust builds up, the chances of the drum brakes sticking on in wet weather increases sharply - even more than the normal sticking that happens with rear disc brakes.

15" alloys even fit over 288mm front discs, well VW ones fit over same version of Polo with 288mm front discs - not much clearance with 15" alloys, but enough as that is what I use on my wife's 2015 Polo in colder weather with winter tyres.

Are you sure that that is the main water pump that gets driven off the back of the exhaust cam shaft, and not just the charge cooler electric water pump?

Lots of these battery based jump packs use a Hill Billy golf trolley battery, I've replaced my one once over the past 20 years though it only tends to be used as a 12V DC power source for a tyre pump and a high speed mini drill, I only needed to use it once on a late 2009 Ibiza that had a battery draining issue that was due to a S/W issue - and it did its job okay! An ex-work acquaintance had a flat battery during the first lockdown, my advice to get him going was to walk to his local Halfords which had a battery based jump pack in stock, charge it fully and use that, part of his trouble was that his car was in his garage and that garage has no mains power. Well that got him back running again, then he chose to save space and buy a compact jump starter a GOCO GB40, having that meant that he managed to help quite a few of his neighbours to get their "under used" cars started during the first lock up. Then he gave in with his car's original battery and went to a fast fit place and they fitted a new battery very cheaply! A few months later, probably when the weather got colder at the start of this winter, he is back to needing to use his small jump starter, and has now discovered what was fitted to his car by that fast fit place, ie an inferior and much lower capacity battery! So maybe he has learned a few lessons, first to get prepared for this as it was always going to happen if that car was going to be used only once a week for a very short shopping journey, and second to make sure that if your car has its original battery in it, find out what its Ah capacity is and its CCA - and only ever buy same again or bigger as it sounds like too many battery places want to get "your" business by selling you the smallest and so cheapest budget battery. I think that his spend so far has been roughly £40 + £100 + £80, the £80 probably equates to what Tayna would charge £40 for, not good. I'd probably love to have one of these compact starter packs - but I'd think that I could end up being disappointed, even after buying a "good" one. My own car is 10 years old in February, so based only on that, I have bought a replacement battery as I don't want to end up in trouble when away from home - if we ever get released to get away from home.

Now that you have bought the extra tools needed, doing it every 5 years/50K miles sounds like a plan that will work well for you. My wife's Polo 1.2TSI 110PS was new in August 2015 and is only at 32K miles, so I'm planning on leaving it for another year and a half - or so. Was the tensioner also in good condition? Maybe a new auxiliary belt at the same time.

Yes, exactly the same battery size and type as my car, UK prices for many car parts are very high when compared with other European countries, maybe that is partly to blame for the vote to leave EEC went the way it did, it could have been avoided if governments had talked seriously about things - well maybe, now too late for that and UK must move on. Edit:- things are probably not s simple as I'm suggesting, maybe a battery costs the same in both countries when compared with how many hours wages of the average worker it costs in each country across Europe.

Good enough, if only I was still brave enough to do that, something has always stopped me manning up to changing cam belts on my own cars! I've changed toothed belts on other machines though, but they didn't have pistons and valves to contend with!

I agree with the comments about always connecting jump leads and charging leads only using the battery +VE post and the body earth bonding domed nut, I've cleared the paint off a couple of the points and coat them with Vaseline when not using them, to protect it from corrosion. Also, as said you would need to use a current meter to check for current drain after the car had shut down all its usual systems, as well as ideally having a battery tester to check its CCA or cold cranking current delivery ability. These stop/start cars have smart charging and so will only ever attempt to make sure that the battery will restart the car, as opposed to to keeping the battery fully charged, so checking the battery with a voltmeter while the engine is running could leave you a bit confused - the plan is to stuff lots of charge into the battery only when on the over run, in a bid to save wasting fuel/emissions.. The car's own systems namely the BMS area within the CAN-Gateway(probably) holds many statistics on the battery, or its interpretation of the car's battery, if you had a VAG compliant scan tool, you would be able to check these channels or fields - a dealership could do that but would probably just drop a new battery and hope that solved this problem. Battery prices, I bought a new 95Ah AGM battery for my 2011 Audi S4, the best price I could get for a Bosch S5 013 was £153, an Audi dealership would have sold me one I'd guess, for £385 and "only" charge me £100 for swopping the batteries and recoding the BMS for that new battery, so in my case, it has cost me £153 instead of £485, maybe battery prices are a bit lower for you, I have priced a new EFB and AGM battery for my wife's 2015 VW Polo 1.2TSI 110PS SEL and the "next size up" is cheaper but still over £100 for the AGM version. At 32K miles, that August 2015 VW Polo EFB is still working okay but its BMS stored statistics claims its present storage capacity has dropped to 37Ah from its original 59Ah, so it is dying slowly, but not yet a problem, stop/start normally gets switched off by me when driving it, and it gets connected to a CTEK charger/maintainer after only being used for a short shopping trip, ie only 10 miles and when not being used for maybe a week, so it has been looked after very well all its life.

It is a bit annoying that this sort of problem has been known about by VW Group for at least 20 years, there used to be a lot of this going on with VW Passat B5 models and leaving everything in place and spraying in cleaner around the steering wheel centre usually washed out enough of the metallic particles. So, now I'm ready for when my wife's 2015 Polo plays up, or maybe not as it normally has its wipers set on "auto" as that car has "rain sensing" so hopefully a lot less wear going on on that stalk.

Hydraulic transmission jack, hummmm, I'd think that you would need to either be working over an inspection pit or have that car quite high up in the air to benefit from having and using one of them. I've replaced front springs on Polo and Ibiza 3 times and I have not got a hydraulic transmission jack. So, short answer, no you don't need one of them.

Once you have the callipers off to change the discs etc, or even before, lever the ball-end of the cable out of its slot in the calliper handbrake lever - then try moving each lever, that will tell you if it is the levers that are stiff and so need cleaned and free'd up, or the cable. I don't think that you will notice much from a bowden cable while one end of it is free from its normal "load".

Hi, I've never had this problem on a VW Group car, but to cover some of your list 2) fuses are either okay as far as the fusible part is concerned or it has blown open circuit. 3) stalks can go bad, but I thought that this applies to newer cars usually. 4) when the spindle bearings start to run dry with age etc, the wipers usually start to slow down quite a bit before thermal overload etc kicks in - have you noticed that the wipers sweep a lot slower than they used to, if so that would be a very cheap and easy fix to make? Also as no doubt you know, there is a remote controller that switches the voltage to the wiper. I think that you will need to work your way through all your listed options, all you need to do with respect to the fuses is to make sure that they are all fully seated in their slots, maybe a bit of a worry that you have had a major power issue though, hopefully that has not caused this (controller).