Graham Butcher

You really do not have a clue how some people are forced to live and many are wondering where their next meal is coming from.

Here is the link as promised. Glow Plug Control Unit 0281003085 Bosch ECU 038907281B 132129 2502129 GZS New | eBay UK

I ordered the replacement plug in module, which looks like a relay and it lives in the engine bay fuse box. It's the big square one in the back left corner of the box, looking from the front of the car. Cost was £51, with free next day delivery by DHL, from a seller on eBay. Once I get to my computer, I can post a link to it if you want? Currently the engine starts on the button, but as the temperature is dropping and will soon be into minus numbers first thing in the mornings, the glow plugs will be really helpful in starting.

Nope, not in the slightest, think about it, loads of pensioners have lost their £200 winter fuel payment, energy companies have had massive windfall profits and yet those that could clearly well afford to pay are enjoying massive savings, something not right there.

If the suppliers are being paid something like 42p a kw to take this excess power then they should be prioritising the less well of in society or, give everyone so many hours of free power per month etc, because although you used 0% finance to fund your gear, you are still better heeled than millions of others are, as there is zero chance of many of them, me included in getting any sort of finance even at 0% interest. In my case the only source of income I have is my pension which barely covers my commitments, and I know that there are many others out there, who aren't pensioners, and are in employment, but still only able to earn the national minimum hourly wage, and many who work in the retail sector for instance are either still on zero hours or 6 to 12 hour per week contracts, surely you must be aware of that? Anyway, this is all getting off topic, so I think we should try and bring it back around to being more in line with that.

Thats the problem, right there of course, besides the time taken to pay for itself. and the installation etc, but of course, once again, not everyone has the free capital laying around in the bank etc in the first place to pay for the required gear to take advantage, so once again there is a multi-tier system in place. When it should be the least well off and pensioners get the benefit of the free/cheaper power and lift them out of fuel poverty, but once again, it is the better heeled in society that are getting all the benefits.

I think so as well, as there is no possible way that they could produce an error code otherwise. It is possible that it has faulty for sometime but has only announced it self owing to lower temps in the mornings now. It has not struggled to start yet, new one will be plugged in as soon as it arrives and the DTC cleared.

Well, I've just bit the bullet and ordered anew one on eBay and it will be here tomorrow, so will soon now if it cures it or not.

Or, in the case of the amazon one, @£899, assuming it did last 3000 charge cycles, once a day, 8.22 years to save yourself 34p a day, you could save yourself £120.10, or 4p a day, is it really worth the hassle? There is also one @£599 which works out at 14p a day savings, £421 if it only lasted 3,000 cycles, still have to ask myself if its really worth it.

Does anyone know if this is a relay or is it a module that controls how long the glow plugs are on for? If its a relay, what are the pin connections for the relay coil? I have the engine management light on and VCDS reports a Implausible Signal from the module, any ideas?

That made me chuckle, yep, and we are having to pay more so you can continue to enjoy the low taxation and VAT on your car, ain't we petrol heads kind and considerate 😁😁

A 2kwh one on Amazon is £899, it sure is going to take a time to get payback, which they claim has 3,000 times recharge cycle so the real question is, do they ever get into the realms of paying for themselves?

I bet your energy supplier is frothing at the mouth, seeing the lengths you go to to avoid paying for power all day unless of course it is in the free period and they will see your demand shoot up to a massive peak in order to cram every single watt of energy into your storage and cars.

Why am I seeing this image of you, now I can't get that image out of my head, its an image worm. 🙄🤔😉

Yes, I did say I had solar, and no I didn't do the sums as if you could actually remember, in my case it was a 100% no brainer as they never cost me a single penny, they were supplied and installed by a company looking to sell any unused power back to the grid. Therefore, I don't have to worry about payback periods, or the question I asked about what if they don't last long enough to put you in profit, before you have pay out again fitting replacements, which just kicks the can even further down the road.

The thing is, with these tariffs where you have solar and or storage batteries, is that you also must take into the equation the purchase costs and the installation costs of them along with the inconvenience during the installation? How long will it be before those costs are repaid and you then honestly hand on heart can say that it is a stable revenue source to you? What if the panels, or the invertor, the batteries or their controllers fail before the initial cost is recovered, you might be better off if that happens to have stayed as you was?

You are right about the tax angle, although I'm not sure about the actual percentage of tax, I could look it up, but the principle is correct. It really is an insult to be paying tax on tax, but that's the way it is and there is nothing I can do about it. With all the tax hike that this government are looking at placing on the motorists, I think that you EV owners should be starting to feel the pressure increasing on you as a lot of the black hole in the nations finances are down to the concessions you have been enjoying in the past, and to some extent, still are. Grants to help buy, BIK tax rates lower, cheap vat on the electric when home charging, zero VED has also been part of it, even in some places, free parking has also been given. It would not surprise me if some of those are withdrawn or seriously reduced, it cannot be allowed to continue much longer. I'm also not sure just what you mean by the real "Truth", but I suspect that you mean that EV's are better for the environment and that they are not a fire hazard, to that I still say, let's wait and see what the future shows up on that issue. I suspect that similar arguments took place years ago when diesel was hailed by various governments as the fuel of choice and was actively promoted like electric cars are today. I still stand by your rights to have whatever type of car you want, be it petrol, diesel or electric, LPG etc and that given time any issues will be resolved with any of them. I mean petrol, used to kill from the carbon monoxide fumes in a confined space, that is no more with the advent of catalytic convertor. Diesel, used to be a really dirty fuel, you could see the black soot particles belching from the tailpipe, DPFs and EGR systems have now reduced that by 96% and is within 1 or 2% of the emissions from a modern petrol engine, so huge strides have been made and I see no reason why the same steps should not be made with battery technology over the years. My only real gripe with battery vehicles is that I totally disagree with the push towards going all new vehicles having to be electric by law, where is the personal choice in that and I just can't help but wonder, if there was zero incentives given an electric cars in any format, just how many of them would be on the roads today? Guess is just a few, in a similar fashion to vehicles converted to run on LPG. We know that there was a push towards diesel years ago and is one reason for the popularity of it today, so just maybe without governments interference in the markets over the years, petrol would still be the major fuel today? At the end of the day who knows, only the fullness of time and results will prove one-way or the other.

I get that, BUT, I was under the impression that we were talking the cost of public charging that holiday hire car you was talking about compared to the cost of public charging here in the UK, not portable domestic power packs, hence my confusion 🤔.

This Kia PV5 modular van base looks to be quite interesting. Yes, I understand about special tarrifs for those who can charge at home, but I was talking about those who can't, and of course, the conversation started about the low cost of charging your holiday rental EV, not your UK rates.

This Kia PV5 modular van base looks to be quite interesting.

To be fair, I don't think there any batteries that have the thousands all in the same pack, but those smaller packs are all in the same overall metal container and even with the fireman port, it does assume that they can actually arrive at the scene before the battery gets to the thermal runaway position, which is just minutes or even seconds as can be seen in many of the online security cameras that capture many of them. The modules are still packed extremely close to each other as can be seen in this photo, so it doesn't take much to set the other modules off.

Nobody is saying or claiming that these things regularly burst into an uncontrollable blaze, but they do indeed catch fire occasionally, that is undeniable unless you ignore the facts. Yes, ICE cars can and do catch fire and most car fires do not involve in the batteries, or their equivalent on an ICE car, the fuel tank, which is precisely what the battery is, a fuel tank. Both diesel and petrol require some external ignition source to catch fire, battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, connected to together in a combination of series and parallel circuits to achieve both the voltage and the current rating, all along with loads of battery management modules, all of which have loads of electronic parts in them and are always directly to the cells monitoring them and regulating them. It only requires a single cell to develop a problem and start off gassing, getting hotter etc and then you have a problem. The equipment we all have indoors, generally does not consist of more than 1 or 2 cells and are also of limited capacity, so they cannot really be compared to a EV battery pack in a car, they are far less likely to catch fire. Now I fully expect that many of the so called EV fires do not involve the batteries but sort of normal vehicle electrical malfunction or something the owner/driver has done, like a discarded cigarette that wasn't fully snuffed out, or a phone charger lead that has gone faulty and has been left plugged in. This actually happened to me in my diesel Superb, my son had been charging his iPhone and when he got out disconnected it from the phone, but left it plugged into the car. Luckily I happened to look back at the car, as you do at times, and saw the car filling up with smoke and went to investigate and saw the phone lead glowing red hot, so I snatched it out from the cars USB socket and the only damage done was it had scorched the leather on the passenger seat between the seat and the centre consol. A close shave indeed, but it does show just how easy it is to start a fire inside a car, and he and SWMBO still to this day are guilty of the same thing at home, leaving the charging lead, laying around, still plugged into the wall charger, which itself is still active, that's all it takes. I have to go round and unplug the wall chargers just in case.

Yet more recent fires in underground carparks, both residential and office and all started by EV's and shows the dangers and also actually highlights how a buildings design can help contain fires.

@lol-lol yeah that is the real difference maker, there with following the rules as in the handbook and brimming the tank, strikes me that the hire company was just out looking to make as much money from what they see as "foreigners" as the ice cream vans at well-known tourists spots in London. Don't forget that sadly we live in rip off Brittain were everything is geared up to maximise the profits of the fat cats who will store the cash in offshore tax havens to avoid any of it ever returning into the UK economy and the fact that as you say, the price of electricity and public charging is so low over there, proves that our prices are kept at an artificially high price. It has never been hidden that we have the most expensive domestic fuel prices in Europe.

No rant, it has been demonstrated to be afake set of figures issued after the event, just as they were before its introduction. That is why the deputy mayer had get their consultant to alter the wording of thier report