A bit of a fright.

[Gibbo2286]

I've been ill for the last fortnight, just a winter cough and cold, so the C5 hasn't been started, decided to pop to Tesco yesterday, the car was quite sluggish on the starter but fired up ok then all the STOP lights came on and 'Power steering fault' on the screen.

No power steering effort at all, drove it back and forth a few times, switched off restarted and gave it a few revs and all the warnings went off, power steering ok, trip to Tesco completed.

I'm assuming it was just the battery being low that caused it, hope that's all.

[myglaren]

I think that they just get confused occasionally.
Once in a while mine will do that, or flag an antipollution fault, or light the EML.
Sometimes everything goes off, CD goes haywire or stops, all the dash lights come on but no temperature, speed, tacho, voltage etc, then after a couple of minutes up to about half an hour it all goes back to normal.
It carries on driving as normal so I have learned to ignore it.
First few times I would stop, turn it off and restart after a few minutes.
The only time we do that now is such as when my son was in Scotland and everything went off in a snowstorm, no wipers, indicators, heater/blower - nothing.
He stopped in a car park for five minutes then carried on with everything working again.

Have to say we have had no trouble at all since the alternator was replaced but it has only been a couple of months so early days.

[GiveMeABreak]

Depends what you have - battery can affect the electro pump power steering types, but the MK IIs also have mechanical pumps - what's your VIN gibbo?

If electropump, then yes battery may be discharged and in this colder weather the extra drain on the power can reduce performance, especially if being run on short trips with lights and heaters on etc. Won't take long to discharge. Other possibility is the alternator belt - if that's a bit loose of course, it can affect charging. When my belt completely sheared off in town, I only noticed 20 miles later when nearly home and the steering got really heavy - sure enough the belt had torn clean off - where they had used a screwdriver previously to put the damned thing on after the A/C compressor change. Was not very happy, but that's what they do.

[Gibbo2286]

It's an electric pump Marc, couldn't be driven without it working unless you had gorilla muscles, I guess it had gone into the mode where everything that wasn't essential was switched off.

[GiveMeABreak]

The X7 one works for quite some time - runs off the battery - until your battery becomes discharged, which mine did over the 20 miles back running everything else - still at least it's better than having no assistance at all on a car this size or it would be a struggle.