I don't know if I'm in the right forum here, so if I'm not, please excuse me.

Bought a second hand Skoda Fabia 1.4 last week from the local dealer, and there's a couple of things that are minor irritations

First off, when you lock the central locking the lights don't flash (i'm guessing they should as other Fabia's do, and there's a relay under the dash that I can hear click once for locked and twice for unlocked)

I presumed the fault lay in a fuse somewhere, so after a lot of searching, I finally gave in and opened up the handbook to find the location of the fuse box... after a lot of head scratching and dashboard tugging, complete with a loss of blood from my index finger, I located the fuses... Fuse 49 is the only one I can see listed that would be central locking related (I don't have the boot lock option on fuse 31). Squinted at the tiny print on the fuse board, to find that I don't have a fuse 49 !! There aren't even any small metal ontacts in there to suggest there should have been a fuse.

Process of elimination time, I yanked 15amp fuses one at a time while locking/unlocking the door, nothing caused it to stop working. I then started on the 20 amp fuses. Nothing... pulled the 25amp and the fan went off At least that one was where the manual said it should be !

Can anyone shed any light ? It's just one of those nice-to-have things that should work and doesn't.

While I'm on the subject.... does anyone know if it's possible to add the tailgate lock option after the car has rolled from the factory without reverting to the skoda dealer ? It would be nice to be able to open the boot from the outside of the car... which I thought was a "standard" thing on cars How wrong I was :(

All in all though, it's a cracking car, and I'm not going to let two minor things get in the way !

There is a better diagram of the fusebox here.

Blinking and beeping when the car is locked/unlocked can be set using Vag-Com diagnostics or the dealer's diagnostics. Depending upon the age of the vehicle, there may be other options that can be set e.g. auto-locking when speed exceeds 10 mph/ auto-unlocking when ignition key removed.

Chat to your dealer next time the car is in for a service (they hook it up to the diagnostics as part of the service anyway) - or find someone with a Vag-Com.

Oooh, cheers ! That solved it... well, that proved I was looking in the wrong place for the fuse...

I was pondering picking up a Vag-Com cable from Ebay, I know I'm a cynic, but is it as siple as

1) Purchase cable from ebay

2) Plug it into the OBD-II connector hidden behind the small tray

3) plug t'other end into laptop's serial Port

4) download the Vag-Com software and tinker ?

Seems cheap for £9.99 plus shipping when VAG-COM themselves are flogging it for >$300

A legal version is not as cheap as that - I bought the USB-based full lead that also does the latest models (Octy 2 amongst them). It auto-licenses the software on any machine it's running on, and it worked well.

The serial cables from ebay may work too though. They don't tend to have protection against K-line problems, but in fairness that's only a problem if someone has wired up something wrong, and with older VAGCOM versions there may be means of getting it licensed that are less legit.

I bought the real thing as I wipe my OS a fair bit due to work, and I prefer the ease of USB over serial, esp. since most of my laptops dont have serial ports, including the ones from work

For a tenner, I guess it's worth a try :-) Cheers guys!