Hello chaps! (and chapettes). My daughter is having a torrid time with her Fabia Mk1. The garage that she took it to has had it three weeks and sent it back exactly as it was. We have been less than impressed. Before letting a specialist electrics guy have a look, I thought that it would be worth consulting the Skoda Yodas.

The battery is flat within a short time of being parked up, potentially overnight. Getting information from the garage has not been easy. There is a battery drain. I had figured that one out for myself. They have told me that they could stop the battery drain by pulling one of the fuses. When asked which one, they didn't know but it shut down a lot of things, although they couldn't elaborate. (I won't be going back there)

I have now disconnected the aftermarket Chinese radio to see what happens, although that predates the problem by quite some time. There is potentially a massive clue as to what is going on. The electric driver side window doesn't move. That MAY have stopped working around the time that this issue occured although my daughter isn't 100 certain.

Hello, welcome to the forum.

The aftermarket radio could well be a suspect, has the parasitic drain reduced since that was disconnected?

Has the battery been thoroughly tested?

Edited 5 May5 May by Warrior193
question

What year is the car, please?

Try removing fuse 43 overnight and see if battery is happier for it.

Just a hunch.

If you haven't already, it's a good idea to take a photo of the cabin fusebox, to help with correctly refitting any fuses that may get pulled during fault finding.

The image below shows a generic layout for (RHD) mk1 Fabia, but there are quite a few variations depending on engine type and fitted equipment, so there may well be more gaps than shown, leading to it being easy to forget where things were even if you only take one fuse out at a time.

Edited 5 May5 May by Breezy_Pete

3 hours ago, Warrior193 said:

The aftermarket radio could well be a suspect, has the parasitic drain reduced since that was disconnected?

Has the battery been thoroughly tested?

+ 1 from me plus i would check the altenator.

Many years back an aftermarket alarm beeper was causing me almost the same ''drain'' problem, i remove it and my battery was as it should be.

Get your M.Meter, change the positive lead to the 10A port, switch the selector switch to 10A. Disconnect the battery negative lead, clamp the positive M.Meter lead to the battery negative lead and the negative M.Meter lead to the (negative) battery post, you can now read off the battery draw down under various conditions, suggest you do it first with the car unlocked then with the car locked, allow ~ 5/10 minutes for each test, you can then remove various fuses to help track down the problem. Ensure you change the M.Meter lead back to its normal position and the selector switch to Off when finished.

Stupid question perhaps, but are you sure that the battery itself is not the problem?