Monday 7 May 2012

300 Miles

Last night we drove down to Wales for a camp and walking day today. After driving back just now, that's 300 miles in two days in a super cheap banger... and... not a beat missed. Even in some quite harsh Welsh mountain roads, she just kept on going. Winner!

And that 300 miles seems to have used about half a tank of fuel. Have signed up on Fuelly.com, so we'll see the MPG figures when I next fill her up.

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Update

I figured it's about time to update this blog with the tiny things that I've done to the car. I've stopped trying to keep a track of the fuel costs. Mainly because I forgot three times and that's screwed the figures. I'm going to sign up for fuelly.com however, which should give us an MPG figure which is arguably more useful anyway.

I think I've worked out what the engine light is trying to tell me. It's saying: "there isn't enough fluid in the radiator". Or at least that's the symptom. Topping up the radiator seems to have fixed it. It's losing coolant slowly, but nothing I'm going to worry about really. I'll just keep topping it up every few weeks. I doubt it's being lost via the head gasket - no oil filler cap mayonnaise and no white smoke.

 I've also worked out what I did wrong when I fitted the car radio. The radio has two power wires. One to provide a normal fused power feed for operating the radio, and the other to provide a permanent feed keeping the radio stations tuned and so on. I'd got these the wrong way round. So the permanent feed was going to the normal power and the switched feed to the memory backup. This explains why we were having to retune the radio each and every time I turned on the ignition! Doh.