Hi,
I noticed lately, that if I turn on the rear window defroster, the defroster relay starts to continuously click(on-off-on...) until the engine gets warm. I also noticed that the heated seats don't heat up as much as they used to while the relay clicking happens. A couple of days ago, I realised that if I turn off the Auto Supplementary Heater(the electric one, not the stationary fuel based one), as this is has a high current draw, the defroster and the seats heating work as they should. The supplementary heater shuts off automatically when the engine is warm, so this explains why the clicking stopped after driving for a while. This looks like some kind of current draw management thing.
No side effects other than the ones above that I can tell of. The car started without a sweat at -9C after sitting for 24+hours. Battery SoH appears to be at 85%.
The alternator seems fine, it has a 14.8 - 14-9V charge(this is not too much for an AGM battery). On a friend's mk7 Golf, after startup the charge current is also at 14.8-14.9V, but on his car the charge drops to 14.4V after a couple of minutes(tested this with everything turned on: heated seats+steering wheel+mirros, rear defroster, supplementary heater...). On my car it takes 15-20min to drop to 14.4V.
Could this be a dying battery or it could be something else? The battery is 5years old, the OE one.
I noticed lately, that if I turn on the rear window defroster, the defroster relay starts to continuously click(on-off-on...) until the engine gets warm. I also noticed that the heated seats don't heat up as much as they used to while the relay clicking happens. A couple of days ago, I realised that if I turn off the Auto Supplementary Heater(the electric one, not the stationary fuel based one), as this is has a high current draw, the defroster and the seats heating work as they should. The supplementary heater shuts off automatically when the engine is warm, so this explains why the clicking stopped after driving for a while. This looks like some kind of current draw management thing.
No side effects other than the ones above that I can tell of. The car started without a sweat at -9C after sitting for 24+hours. Battery SoH appears to be at 85%.
The alternator seems fine, it has a 14.8 - 14-9V charge(this is not too much for an AGM battery). On a friend's mk7 Golf, after startup the charge current is also at 14.8-14.9V, but on his car the charge drops to 14.4V after a couple of minutes(tested this with everything turned on: heated seats+steering wheel+mirros, rear defroster, supplementary heater...). On my car it takes 15-20min to drop to 14.4V.
Could this be a dying battery or it could be something else? The battery is 5years old, the OE one.