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Some follow-up on Halfords failing to code my new battery fitted by them. Everything was working OK, but I was worried about the longevity of the battery and was going to find someone local with a VCDS as suggested by this forum. However, I have a Vgate adapter with WiFi connection anyway and started looking at the diagnostics with different softwares on my Android phone. To my surprise the CarScanner App actually has the ability to do quite a lot of coding built into it for certain models (incl. most Skodas) - google car scanner to get to their site and look at the tab for "coding and service" It shows which cars it will code. Note that to see the coding button on the app you need to have setup a connection profile for your Skoda first in settings (for my Octavia 3 1.2 TSI it is the second profile on the Skoda list) and it has to be connected to the car CPU by WiFi or Bluetooth, whichever you have on your adapter. When you start, it strongly recommends that you backup all your car settings before changing anything and warns that it takes some time (about 5-10 minutes) Then I scrolled to the battery section and it has the standard 4 parameters: Capacity, Type, Manufacturer and Serial number. I changed all of them as suggested in this forum. Capacity from 59 Ah to 70 Ah, Type from EFB to Fleece (for AGM) manufacturer from JCB to HAL and changed the serial number from 11111111111 to 11111111112. It happily accepted all of these parameters and showed them as the stored parameters when I looked later. A word of warning - the free version of CarScanner only lets you change 3 parameters so I had to buy the pro version for £4 halfway through programming, but if you don't want to buy it, then don't change the manufacturer code as that is the only one which doesn't actually need changing and just change the serial number to make it realise that you have a new battery plus the capacity and type if you need to. Everything still works OK and hopefully it will be charging correctly now, but I am not going to play around with any of the other myriad of settings it will let me code. There you are - Battery coding for a few pounds.

There doesn't seem to be any doubt about whether new batteries need to be coded into the car on this forum or anywhere else that I have read on the internet. The original battery suddenly failed on my 2014 Octavia Mk III stop/start 1.2 petrol after 90,000 miles, ( a good innings!) so I ordered a new one from Halfords and paid the £27 fitting charge so it could be coded. Old battery was a Moll EFB 59 Ah. New one to be fitted is a Halfords AGM 096 70 Ah, so different technology and capacity. The technician from Halfords "Tyres on the Drive" mobile service came and spent a couple of minutes changing the battery. I started it up, only error message was the stop/start. Turned the steering both ways and all was well. When I said about the coding, he said that it didn't need to be done on VAG cars as they sorted themselves out and he didn't have any coding equipment anyway! We spoke to his supervisor on the phone and he also said that it didn't need coding. The stop/start works and all electrics, but I am concerned about charging rates fuel consumption battery longevity etc. So I phoned up Halfords again and spoke to several people who all said that it didn't need coding, but did agree to refunding the £27 fitting charge as I was pretty cross, because I could have bought the battery and fitted it myself much quicker. The questions are: are Halfords right? has anyone had their car properly coded by Halfords, and what should I do now - get it coded by someone else?

Just bought an Octavia estate 1.2 2014. Really pleased with it so far, other than the fact that I couldn't open the fuel filler cover. With advice from your fora, I was able to get in and buy and fit a new actuator quite simply.