Oops - got locked out!

[Martyn]

Well today has been an interesting day. Went to collect my 2 from my Dad's house (it had been there for a few days offroad whilst waiting for the MOT date), and found the battery to be completely dead. Since my car has been de-keyed (is that what you call it?), I had absolutely no way of opening the car. Not even the little alarm LED on the dash was flashing, so the battery was completely flat.

After 30mins of faffing around trying various things, I called the AA. AA man arrived in 10mins (wow) and managed to get the driver's door open in about 1.5mins (even more wow). He charged the battery and all is well again now.

The cause seems to have been the radio - for some reason it's on a permanent live, not an ignition feed. I hadn't turned off the radio and just left it on pause mode. It was draining 5A from the battery, so no wonder the battery was flat after 3 days!! Turned the radio off, and now it's only draining by 0.7A when the engine is off.

Alls well that ends well. A bit scary though - I thought for a bit I might have to put a brick through the window to get in!!


Just wondering though - is there something I can do to avoid this in the future? I don't intend to leave the radio on again - but what I mean is, maybe there's someway I can rig up an external socket leading to the battery, so I can attach an external battery without unlocking the car for example. Dunno how easy that would be, and would it interfere with the alarm in any way?

[robbie_742003]

Hiya, im not sure about external batteries, never tried it. What i will say is that you should have a look at your stereo electrics, u should have 2 'lives', one ignition and the other permanent for the memory, that will stop the draining.

[Ed]

I was thinking of completely delocking my car as well. If I do it I will be adding in a system to avoid this sought of problem. What I would do is add wires that run from the battery terminals to two hidden waterproof jacks that i could plug an external power source to. This would provide the battery with enough power to allow the alarm to deactivate and unlock the doors.

This of course only helps with flat batteries. If the servos fail then your still stuck with calling out the AA in order to open the door.

HTH Ed

[Martyn]

My thoughts exactly. I would think that it would be very unlikely that both servos to break at the same time though - so at least entry could be gained via one of the doors.

Now all I have to do it figure out a good hiding place for the battery terminals.