Graham Butcher

No, I did not say your logic was faulty. Looking at the workshop manual, there is another possibility for cars with the start/stop system, the battery monitor module which is part of the negative terminal. There is a 2 pin plug coming away from it and one lead connects to the starter solenoid, the other to the alternator. Now, if this is playing up, it will have an impact on both the charging and the starting. Modern cars are just so complicated, that it is almost impossible to repair them yourself with access to loads of expensive equipment.

Charging the battery is not really an option for me as I cannot get my car into my garage, garage too small for such a big car😉 and running leads out from the house to the kerbside is strictly frowned upon and should someone trip of the lead, then I become liable ☹️ A voltage of just 12.4V will only trickle charge a battery and is ideal to keep a car's battery fully topped up if it is not being driven on a daily basis, which my car is . And also if a car requires having its battery being regularly topped up when the alternator has an output of a 140A smacks of a charging issue and needs to sorted ASAP. Edit. Added text. Maybe I should have pointed out that I'm a retired auto electrician and as such I understand the battery is a storage vessel, or as you put it, a bank account. With an alternator capable of outputting upto 140A, there should be a need to charge a car battery unless that car has not been used for a few weeks, but not a car that is in use daily, even for short trips of a couple of miles is enough to keep the battery well charged. This, however, was not the case a few years when most cars only had dynamos, especially if that car was spending a lot of time crawling along in heavy traffic and sitting at traffic lights. Dynamos do not produce much power, sometimes none at all when in such conditions, due to the low engine revs, they need engine revs to be a lot higher to produce reasonable power. An alternator is capable and is designed to produce loads of power at even at tick over speeds. This link might help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator_(automotive)

The battery spec for the car and indeed for the battery now fitted is an AGM type with a CCA rating of 760A and has a capacity of 70AH, so there is no on earth that just having the radio on for an hour could drain a battery of that size to a point where it is incapable of cranking the car.

Surely disconnecting the battery is not a good thing to do for the time it takes to carry out a low level charge, all the control units on the car will complain that they have been lost power and the dash will awash with error lights and error messages on the dot matrix display. The current battery is the 2nd in the car's life. The first lasted almost 7 years before it gave up the ghost and went to battery heaven after the alternator belt snapped, and the battery died while trying to limp the car into a Skoda dealer one day in Cambridge and failed to make it, dying completely at the side of the A14. The battery has a 4-year warranty and was purchased 19/9/19 so is still under warranty, I'll get that tested for problems when the car goes in for service next week.

After letting the car stand for almost 20 hours, I tested the battery voltage, and it is 12.12V and started the engine a few times with no problem what so ever and just after starting the voltage reads 14.7V as the alternator tries to replace the energy that the starting took out of the battery. Then driving it a few minutes later around the City and the Start/Stop system was kicking almost from the start, just as it does normally in heavy city traffic. I think that is a sign of a bad battery, surely not?

Doesn't the battery monitor the battery and instruct the Ecu to disconnect the item, in this case the radio. I know the system does switch things off if you leave anything ON after a few minutes to prevent problems.

Thanks, I never knew that, just tried it and it worked as long as I put my foot on the brake pedal. 👍

If it was the battery failing or failed, I'd have expected to display these kinds of symptoms often, but since the jump start 3 days ago the car has been fine, and I have been to Southend and North Weald again since then as well shopping which are short journeys in town with lots of stop/starts with no hint of any problems. I'm going out again in few minutes on some short local trips and I'll measure the battery voltage again then, before I start the engine and after.

You make it sound as if there are 2 batteries in my car, I assure you, I only have the one. Also if you look at my details, the car is a DSG auto, so there is no clutch pedal to depress and the only way to start the car is with the transmission in park position and my foot on the brake pedal. If none of those conditions are not met, the starter is locked out of circuit. The car had been parked at the airfield for around 2 hours so the engine was not hot, it was a cold engine, just as it was at the start of the journey. The car has regenerative braking system so when slowing down using the engine as a brake the alternator is designed to dump extra current into the battery, thus placing more rolling resistance to the cars forward motion.

I could accept that if the car had struggled to start at the beginning, but as it normally does it fired into life instantly, and on the journey from home to the airfield I did not have to stop anywhere along the route, it was a nice leisurely drive with me doing my normal style of driving, smooth and gentle, hypermiling to get the best performance because of the stupidly high fuel prices we are seeing now.

Yes it is stop/start but when you have driven best part of 20 miles without the system kicking in once, you don't expect the battery to be drained sufficent to prevent the car starting after sitting in it with the radio on for about an hour and nothing else do you. I think it is the alternator clutch pulley at fault after Googling the problem, it does seem common for cars with 60,000 to 80,000 miles on the clock for this to start slipping in both directions and would explain why the alternator output drops so much when the engine revs pick up. There is nothing else switched on, radio, fans, AC and lights are all off but the output drops to 1A, even with the lights etc switched on, this does not increase. The car is in the dealers on the 5th for seat belt replacement on the rear offside, brake fluid replacement, 80,000 mile service plus MOT so, I've asked them to check on the alternator pulley and replace if it is faulty. I'll report back with their findings. This is the second time I had issues with the charging, last time was a year ago after I had driven 80 miles in the daylight so nothing on other than radio and aircon, so you'd have expected the battery to have been charged enough after such a long drive 1hr 45 mins?

Yes it has the Stop/Start system with AGM battery which is about 2.5 years old but I seem to recall came with a guarantee of 4 or 5 years. The original battery lasted 6 years before it shuffled off the earth.

Thanks, I never knew that it had one, I know the AC pump has one.

Yeah, those are the kind of leads that I opted for, sort of middle of the road, the leads have nice copper croc clips on them and the leads thick and flexible, feel good quality but perhaps the actual cable itself might be undersized, but then the cable would become rather warm to the touch, but it didn't. Maybe it was because I was unable to extract much power from the person providing me the loan of their battery. I say this because it was one of these more modern cars with a plastic distribution system on top of his battery so my clips were barely able to hang on. My main concern is the way that the alternator seems to be behaving, with the charge reducing with engine speed.

I was at my local airfield yesterday photographing some planes that were taking off to take part in an air show and waiting for them to return again, and as it was extremely hot and sunny, sat in the car with the blower on, engine off and as is normal for my car, the blower and anything else that happens to be on, switches off automatically after a few minutes and so it did, but as the car was then cooler, I never switched the fan back on. However, when I went to start the engine to drive home again, it just clicked and the dash lights and instruments flashed and the instruments switched on and off rapidly and nothing happened. I asked a friend who was also on the field to give me a jump start, however that was totally useless, I expect my leads simply were not up to the job. Luckily there was a large Emergency Services repair centre on the field, and they repair Ambulances so I asked them if they could assist me, they did and their cables were far more effective and the engine sprang to life instantly, so I was able to drive home, some 20 miles in total and by the time arrived home the car started on the button again. Today I got my voltmeter on the battery and ammeter on the battery lead and I measured 14.2V on the battery and 7 Amps were going into the battery at idle, far enough. Now here is where it gets strange, unless I'm missing something here, giving the engine a little rev, the voltage remains constant, but the charging current drops to 1A and sometimes less, but as soon as the engine returns to a tick over again, the current goes up. I thought the alternator belt might be loose, no it is OK, so its not a case of the belt slipping. Any ideas? I wondered if the battery monitor control unit might be faulty?

Yes, my manual is almost the mirror copy of that step by step list. However, as I cannot even get the rear trim panels off to get access to the belt in the first place, I have booked the car in for its 80,000 mile service and also the MOT test, and the dealer is also going to replace the belt for me at the same time. To that end I have already returned the second hand one I got for a refund which they did instantly for me with no problem, so I will no doubt be using that breaker again in the future for other parts.

The old manual that I was unable to load on the PC I didn't get of eBay, it was what was supposed to a genuine seller that Google found. The print quality was bad as well. The new one is vastly superior in every aspect. What was good was that I got mkII and also mkIII manuals for just £9.95. Yes the links are different, page numbers instead of chapter's. Some of the illustrations are also in colour.

As you can see from the attached page of the manual, it is a genuine Skoda manual and I still find it lacking in detail, so I can assume that the manual is used internally by the mechanics in conjunction with their hands on training and armed loads of update sheets for various model tweaks etc. If you zoom in close, this can only be seen on screen, just beneath the large Skoda watermark in the centre of the page, the actual copyright message from Skoda, showing that its not a third party copy such as Haynes, but that it is the genuine Skoda article. S0062170020-Body_Work.pdf

Here is an update on the current position. I still could not get my VMware based manual to operate, turns out to be I believe a hooky copy and the producers have been able to identify it online and disable it, which would account for the specific instructions that came with it for installing. So I invested in yet another manual, infact I got the Mk2 and the Mk3 versions for the same money, bargain. Pages are perfectly scanned, the old one I always suspected were scans done from scans, not so this time. Now I have full access to hundreds of pages and all the missing instructions that the pages already kindly supplied by varooom showed the various links to, but still the instructions are not clear enough to proceed without running the risk of breaking some trim parts in the process which I'm not happy in doing, the car apart needing a good valet is in mint condition and I want to keep it that way. So I contacted my dealer and the VWaudi Tech in my city for quotes to supply a new seat belt in colour and fit it, VWaudi Tech, £390 and my dealer £302, so I've booked in with the dealer, who has looked after the car from new and were originally looking at the end of Sept before they could do it. Then they noticed that their records showed it was not only due for an MOT, but also it was time for the brake fluid to be changed, and its service was due in 4 weeks time, so they have now managed to squeeze all 4 jobs in on the 5th Sept, well done them. Its also Tax and insurance time so its going to be an expensive couple of months. I thank all the members for their very kind efforts, but the parts shown in the manual seem to be different to those fitted, and the screws mentioned don't exist and I have other trip panels that sit above the one I need to remove, but that has to be removed first, and the manual makes zero mention of that at all 😲. Now I just need to return the 2nd hand belt for a refund.

I'm currently installing the virtual machine on a laptop and will try and run it there first, if not then erWin Skoda could be an option. Another option is, as I don't have anywhere else other than the street to do this in, is to perhaps return the 2nd hand one for a refund and just book the car into my dealer for its service which is due in 20 days have it serviced and let them fit a replacement belt and then MOT it as well. I'd rather not have the expense as I'm retired, and the pension is not at all generous, but I rely on the car to get the wife to and from her place of work as well as my son and to do the family shopping etc. It is the only car in the family, and I'm the only driver. Its been way too hot do anything like this until now, and today I got soaked with more rain forecast, which is reducing the time I have available.

Thanks, that is not going to work because of where the webbing is cut, it would be highly visible. I'm really struggling with the instructions because they keep referring me to various chapters that I don't have access to remove various bits of trim. I do however have a full manual on my PC that is where I think wokwon extracted the instructions that he kindly posted. However I cannot access it because Windows 10 gives me an error message saying that because it is based on a VMware system of virtual machine, it cannot run while Microsoft Hyper_V is installed. It is disabled in the settings but still refuses to load WTF.

Well, I've discovered that the belt does infact lock up if pulled sharply, so that seems to be OK in that dept. The reason why I could not get the belt to pull out, is because of the angle I was holding it at, if I place in the horizontal position, as it would be installed in the car, the belt is free to pull out all the way to the very end and rewinds nicely. With it in that position, any attempt to snatch the belt results in an immediate locking of the belt, as it would do in an accident scenario. One thing that does slightly concern me however is that when it comes to disconnecting the airbag, the instructions refer to a specific section in the workshop manual for the correct disconnection and reconnection sequence to prevent the airbag from going off by accident. I assume that there might well be a similar sequence (whatever that is) for the pretensioner (if fitted to my car) but what that is I have no idea. I do have the workshop manual installed on my computer but with the latest version of Windows 10, it does load but flashes up a message about it will not work with the currently installed OS, it used to work just fine before with earlier versions of Win10. I have searched high and low for replacement belt, but being cream, they are just not that plentiful, new or 2nd hand. I grabbed the only one that was available in colour as the MOT is due in 3 weeks time, and it was 2nd hand from a breakers yard, new it is impossible to get outside the dealers and only want to supply and fit. I'm only having to replace the belt because my son sat in the back with his special box opening knife that he uses at work, clipped to this belt and this clipped itself onto the belt and managed to cut half the belt and as such will fail the MOT test.

Ok, I'm puzzled, the replacement (2nd hand) has arrived, very grubby and needs cleaning but currently cannot be pulled out to allow the belt to be cleaned. On the side of the mechanism, there is a 2 pin electrical connector with a warning label saying that the belt should not be fitted into another vehicle, malfunction could occur and could be dangerous. In the instructions in the posts above, there is zero mention of any electrical connection to disconnected or made apart from the connections to the airbag which behind the trim panel for the wheel arch cover on the C pillar and the connection to the heated rear seats. So is it the correct seat belt for 2013 L&K or is it from a more modern car with pretensioners and thus not suitable?

Wow, many thanks for the detailed info, belt is on its way to me, now I need to grab myself a torque wrench and hopefully a decent day to fit it without getting roasted alive or soaking wet. I'll post back here when its all done.

I'm in a 5 door sedan, or as we call it, a hatch back, does that help?