Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Mandrake]

A good dump of snow predicted for tomorrow so went out to remove the Xantia from the battery charger that it has been on for a few days, started it up to let it run a few minutes and noticed the left low beam is dead.

In 10 years of driving Xantia's I've never had to replace a headlight bulb (just a couple of stop/tail lights) so I have no idea what kind of bulbs they use or whether low and high beam filaments are even in the same bulb package. (High beam and parking lights are still working)

I don't suppose anyone knows off hand what low beam bulb a 1997 Mk1 Xantia needs and a good place to order them from ? If they're not too expensive would it be wise to replace the right hand one as well on the basis that it may also be on its last legs ?

[Hell Razor5543]

Probably H1 bulbs.

https://www.powerbulbs.com/vehicles/car ... ight-bulbs

[Zelandeth]

Best "okay, I thought that was dead" battery revival so far was the one that came with my VW T25, a nice Bosch Silver one - fine aside from the fact the van had been sitting for nearly ten years with the headlights on. Measured a dead 0.00V when I took it off and totally open circuit. Electronic charger didn't even see anything there.

Left it for a week on an old school charger until it gradually started to pull some current, once enough was flowing to actually register on the meter on the charger I transferred it over to the fancy electronic charger. It took quite a while, but eventually showed as fully charged.

I never had to charge it again...and the van wasn't in regular use and had a stuffed non return valve on the fuel feed so it usually took a fair old amount of cranking to start. I imagine it was probably a few Ah short of the quoted 100, but it was definitely still usable - and got grabbed to jump start a few cars too.

As far as I'm aware it's still going now...

[Mandrake]

Probably H1 bulbs.

https://www.powerbulbs.com/vehicles/car ... ight-bulbs

Uh oh, too much choice!!

Given that different bulbs claim to be brighter than "standard" bulbs by varying degrees, I guess that means I really ought to fit a pair so left and right bulbs are the same brightness.

And given that Xantia low beams are so crap from the factory a higher output bulb seems like a good idea...

[Hell Razor5543]

One thing that REALLY bugs me is that, when Aldi and Lidl do car bits, they no longer do H1 bulbs (H4 and H7 in various outputs, but NOT H1 bulbs!!!). However, the C5 uses H4 and H7, so I am OK (but when I had a Xantia I did not have the option of a decent price).

[RichardW]

Osram night breaker, won't last very long but you will be able to see where you are going!

[white exec]

Both Osram Nightbreaker and Philips XTreme are fine, lifetime-wise.
Have used both for years at a time.
There are some fakes of both around, apparently. Check the hologram on the packing, and buying from a reputable source.
For the compromised Xan dip, well worth getting either of these.

[RichardW]

I drive 7 or 8k a year with the lights on; high output bulbs do well to last a year....!

[Michel]

Osram motorcycle bulbs in both my cars now - "Nightracer" I think they're called. Basically a nightbreaker car bulb beefed up to withstand the vibrations of motorcycle.

Motorbike has retrofitted LED headlights. So much safer even though technically illegal. My MOT man tested the sim and beam and said they would pass...

[Mandrake]

Osram night breaker, won't last very long but you will be able to see where you are going!

The Xantia gets driven very little and not much of that in the dark. It would be nice to be able to see well when I do though!

The headlights in the Ion are soooo much better than the Xantia, even though the MOT man claimed the "pattern isn't great" on them - dunno what he's talking about, the dip pattern looks fine to me!

One other thing, that left hand headlight has had a condensation problem on the inside of the front glass for a while now, at least a year - is it possible that condensation had formed on the bulb itself at the time I turned it on causing it to go "pop" due to unequal heating ? Seems a strange co-incidence that the side with a condensation issue was the one to go...

Is the light enclosure normally supposed to be air-tight to keep condensation out ? Or is it supposed to breathe ?

[white exec]

Breathe, usually, so any condensation has a chance to escape - usually through a small vent on the rear side, or even just through the bulb-holder flange itself. Regular headlight use keeps things dry as a rule.
The glass front has a neoprene gasket under it, all held down with the clips. This gasket can fail to do its job, sometimes as a result of re-fitting. It gets a bit delicate with age.

[Mandrake]

The new 12v battery for the Ion arrived yesterday.

I put it on my intelligent Lidl 12v battery charger last night before fitting to the car today to ensure it was starting off fully charged - interestingly it turns out that it arrived only about 80% charged as the charger charged it at 1 amp for about 6 hours until it was satisfied that it was fully charged... I was under the impression that 12v batteries were sold fully charged ?

Anyway, fitted it today and decided to do some testing of the old one out of interest, because that's how I roll. At the time it was removed from the car it should have been fully charged. I popped it on the Lidl charger - normally it does a quick "probe" of the battery condition where it ramps up slowly over a couple of seeconds to 6 amps and monitors the voltage rise - it does this both to identify the battery type (6v, 12v etc) and also get a very rough idea of whether the battery is flat, partly charged or fully charged so it knows which part of its multi-stage charging cycle to start with.

Normal reaction of a fully charged battery to this probing is the voltage quickly goes up to about 14.4v then drops back to around 13-13.5 volts, at which point it will give it a top up charge of 1 amp for about 15-30 minutes with the voltage slowly rising to 14.4v again then shutting off.

However every time I connected the charger and pushed the start button it would immediately ramp up to 15.4v with the charger then reporting "error", aborting the entire charge session.

The charger has correctly identified a faulty battery (probably high internal resistance) as no healthy 12v battery whether discharged or fully charged would allow the terminal voltage to rise quickly as high as 15.4v with only a 6 amp charge.

I then tried a discharge test on my other battery tester/charger/discharger to measure usable capacity, unfortunately it is limited to a discharge power of 5 watts, so about 0.4 amps at 12v. It measured a usable capacity of 1.4Ah!

This is in line with the <1Ah I was seeing with the 3 amp load of a heated seat cover, since usable discharge capacity is highly dependent on discharge rate with Lead Acid. That is one sick battery...!

I then charged it again using the same charger - initially it started at 3.6 amps but reached 14.4 volts after only two minutes (!) and dropped to about 2.4 amps to maintain that voltage. It finished charging after only 1.2Ah was put into the battery. Again, very sick! Remarkable that the car could run so normally on a battery with such minimal capacity left. If it wasn't for the heated seat covers I wouldn't have really noticed.

I wonder what happened to the battery ? Charge voltage in the car is spot on, and electrolyte levels in the battery are perfect as well, despite me never checking them previously.

The only thing I can think of is that it has either had several deep discharges (it's definitely had one in my time with the car) or its the original almost 8 year old battery and well past its use by date....

[RichardW]

It would long since have given up being able to crank a normal engine!

[white exec]

Probably the battery was more-or-less happy enough to just about keep systems and light-duty functions going, but heated seats were in a different league. A good 7Ah gel battery might well have scored better than your dying one (1Ah!).

With all the concentration on BEV traction batteries, the 12v systems supply is easily forgotten! Good news that it's all working well again, and the death certificate properly authenticated.

[Mandrake]

Ordered two "OSRAM Night Breaker Laser (Next Generation) H1 (Twin)" from powerbulbs.com - it wasn't entirely clear whether twin refers to a twin filament or two bulbs in a packet - the picture only shows one bulb in the packet so I assume its a twin filament that does high beam as well ?

Thought I'd let people know powerbulbs.com are doing a 25% off offer at the moment using the code YULE25 - so what would have cost me £46 a week ago only cost me £34.50. So if you need some bulbs now is a good time to buy...