IVA Retest

The weather has turned.. Its bloody freezing!  Was under the impression retests were done in the afternoon.. WRONG! Had to be there for 8am again.

Left the house at 6:15am.. There was a heavy frost and it was freezing.  A jumper and two coats to keep warm.  I set off on the 30 mile trip to the test centre in the dark.

Straight away I was cold.. on a motorbike you get warmth from the engine, sat in the car I wasn't getting any warmth at all. The water temperature has been running about 60-70 degrees most of the time as a normal running temperature. The car was struggling to get the water temperature over 35 degree so I wasn't feeling any warmth from the engine.

I was only 5-6 miles into the trip and the battery light started to flash on the digidash. Checking the volts on the dash and I was already down to low 12 volts and it appeared the car was not charging at all.  At that point it was either turn round or crack on and get through the test and worry about it later, I decided to crack on. Drive all the way down without any high beam to save on power.

I arrived about half an hour early, the centre was locked up so it was standing in the cold for me some more. I was freezing!!!

Lucky for me I packed some hot tea!

Amazing sky..

We started the test at 8am, I explained to the tester than I was having issues with the battery and thought it was the cold. He allowed me to keep the engine running throughout the test.

Two hours later I had a fail..   GRRR...

It was a great result in my book, emissions and noise went through and I thought I was going to get a fail here.

It failed on the blood handbrake, very annoying as I had been to an MOT centre to have this tested. Was told I was getting 18-19% efficiency. I was only seeing about 65 kgs worth of braking pressure with the hand brake, that needed to be a minimum of 81 kgs with the car weighing 475kgs to satisfy the limit of 18%.

I also wasn't allowed both sets of side indicators working at the same time so it was a fail here. Didn't bother fixing these as it was such a simple fix.

All the way through the test I was loosing battery power. I was below 11.5 volts by the end of the test.

Now it was time to get home.. It was dry so I was looking forward to the trip home. If I could keep the rev's high I was hoping to put some charge back in the battery and I would not need to run any lights. 

WRONG!  5 miles down the road the engine started to cut out and I lost the top injectors. I pulled over and the engine died. The digidash was reporting 8 volts! 

Straight onto the phone to the RAC to see if they could recover me. It was clear at this point I was not getting any charge and the battery was completely dead.

20-30 minutes later a very nice RAC man turned up. Think he was pleased to see something different from a normal production car.

He had a good look at the car and tried to get it going, ran the booster on it and checked earths etc. I did say I thought I needed to be recovered as it was something more serious that could not be resolved at the side of the road.

Was really impressed with the chap, he gave some really good ideas on how to avoid these problems in the future and giving easier access to the battery terminals etc.

A recovery truck was call, again about 20 minutes and they were with me. Annoyingly they said because I didn't have tax and wasn't registered I had to pay for recovery... £151!!!!!  Ouch! 

 I was just so pleased to be in the warm...

A long morning...  but a successful day in my book!!!  It would have been alot worse if I had failed on noise and emissions.