[johnny_quattro]

I've been having quite a lot of trouble recently starting my car, and my recent purchase of a 600 Amp battery pack has been a very worthwhile investment, I can assure you. For those interested, it's a DBPower device which can start cars of up to 6 litres capacity. Booked the car in with the local garage to clean up the fabled battery/starter motor/alternator connection box on the chassis rail towards the front of the car. I last had it attended to around 7 years ago and as per usual, it was all crudded up with verdigris (that bluey/green stuff).

I still had problems starting the car so went up to Harry Halfords to get them to do their Yuasa battery test on my silver 019 battery. They told me the battery simply needed charging (showed capacity as 408 out of 800) which then led me to conclude that the alternator is on its way out. One minute it shows 12.3V with engine running, occasionally showing as much as 12.9V but if any accessories are on, voltage drops again. The aircon fan when it kicked in was enough to see it drop on occasion to 11.9V to 12.2V. That's never enough to charge, bearing in mind it's 2.1V per cell, so around 12.6V under ideal conditions. Before I attempted to start the car, it was showing 11.5V.

A quick emergency-type phone call late Friday evening to the forum sponsors, a nice chat with Maria and I have a replacement alternator on its way to me this morning - mileage from that S8 car when the alternator was removed should (in theory) give us another 50 to 60 thousand miles of electrickery....

I'm looking forward to getting this done tomorrow as I've been unable to use the aircon/stereo for obvious reasons.

Note - I obtained my voltage levels using the two-button push on the climate controls, using register 36 on the LHS to show the voltage on the RHS display. Another useful register to monitor is 102, which came in handy for coolant temperatures when my thermostat got stuck/old.

How to:
Press and hold the recirculation button, and then press the vent control up arrow. The left temperature indicator then displays a code number, and the right temperature indicator its value. Traverse the codes with the temperature + or - buttons.