Car alarm sounding while parked at home

[Jonetc15]

Our Skoda Yeti's alarm has started to sound while parked at the top of our quite steep drive about 40/50m from the road. It's been exceptionally cold by day (zero) and night (down to -5 recently. The car has a windscreen cover. It has hardly been used for months, and even then only five miles once or twice a week. We run the engine and move the car several times a week.

Has anyone any idea as to why the alarm should suddenly start to sound?

TIA

Jon

[Mike4]

Our Skoda Yeti's alarm has started to sound while parked at the top of our quite steep drive about 40/50m from the road. It's been exceptionally cold by day (zero) and night (down to -5 recently. The car has a windscreen cover. It has hardly been used for months, and even then only five miles once or twice a week. We run the engine and move the car several times a week.

Has anyone any idea as to why the alarm should suddenly start to sound?

TIA

Jon

Car alarms often go off in extremely hot weather and it is generally considered to be caused by high convection air currents set up in the cabin by the heat triggering the movement sensors. I can imagine the same thing happening in extreme cold too but I don't know this happens for a fact.

[MonsterMork]

Battery getting low would be my bet. Get in on charge or replace it and all should be good.

MM

[staffordian]

Battery getting low would be my bet. Get in on charge or replace it and all should be good.

MM

I bought a CTEK MXS 5.0 battery charger and conditioner soon after lockdown started last year and can heartily recommend it.

It will charge a flat battery and can be left connected indefinitely to keep the battery topped up. It can be set up for normal batteries or AGM types such as found on cars with stop-start systems.

https://www.ctek.com/uk/products/car/mxs-5-0-uk

Modern cars will drain their battery if left for long periods because of things like alarms, which are always live.

No connection, other than satisfied user, and there are other makes and models, but this came highly recommended on several car forums.

[monabri]

As an alternative suggestion....

Open the front doors and look for any cables that run from the door to the car body. If these connections are made using a connector then there might be some corrosion/ bad connection established. The bad connection might be triggering the interior light/alarm.

Disconnect the battery ( mandatory ) and then disconnect the cable by giving the cable connector a twist through 90degree or so. Then clean up any connects and reassemble.

[Jonetc15]

Battery getting low would be my bet. Get in on charge or replace it and all should be good.

MM

Many thanks for the various replies. MonsterMork's suggestion that I should charge charge the battery is within my limited practical competence, and my wife is especially grateful for it. If all goes to plan I'll report back.

Much appreciate monabri's advice, but disconnecting the battery would probably mean that I couldn't get all sorts of things to work on reconnection. (We find changing the clock forwards and backwards too much of a challenge and leave it an hour out every six months...)

ATB

Jon

[mark88man]

Battery getting low would be my bet. Get in on charge or replace it and all should be good.

MM

Many thanks for the various replies. MonsterMork's suggestion that I should charge charge the battery is within my limited practical competence, and my wife is especially grateful for it. If all goes to plan I'll report back.

Much appreciate monabri's advice, but disconnecting the battery would probably mean that I couldn't get all sorts of things to work on reconnection. (We find changing the clock forwards and backwards too much of a challenge and leave it an hour out every six months...)

ATB

Jon

You could set it half an hour ahead of GMT so you were only half an hour wrong all year round. I think having a lesser magnitude of wrongness even its all the time has its attractions

[bungeejumper]

Much appreciate monabri's advice, but disconnecting the battery would probably mean that I couldn't get all sorts of things to work on reconnection. (We find changing the clock forwards and backwards too much of a challenge and leave it an hour out every six months...)

You could set it half an hour ahead of GMT so you were only half an hour wrong all year round. I think having a lesser magnitude of wrongness even its all the time has its attractions

Agree, it's a pain finding the (often) two separate switches and then stepping them through the various option levels to adjust the clocks. . I still don't understand why car manufacturers haven't found a way to make the twice-yearly task easier - I've had to check my owner's manuals (VW and Toyota) more times than I care to admit. Even so, I'd draw the line at being wrong all the time. A summertime scrap of Post-It note on the dash saying +1 would probably suffice.

Thanks for the reminder about topping up the battery, though, MM. Will get my trickle charger on the case today.

BJ

[monabri]

Just give it a wriggle then......the cable, that is!

[dealtn]

I still don't understand why car manufacturers haven't found a way to make the twice-yearly task easier

They have, some have even implemented it. Mine does it itself with no intervention from me.

[richlist]

Our Mercedes cars adjust time automatically.

[bungeejumper]

I still don't understand why car manufacturers haven't found a way to make the twice-yearly task easier

They have, some have even implemented it. Mine does it itself with no intervention from me.

Thanks guys, It was always obvious that if a mobile phone/boiler/whatever could do it seamlessly, then so could a car. I'm just buying the wrong class of car.

BJ

[Watis]

The first time I had to change the clock on my 2009 Yaris, it took three weeks - and when I did manage to change it, I didn't know what I had done differently.

Worked it out in the end though.

Watis

[DrFfybes]

(We find changing the clock forwards and backwards too much of a challenge and leave it an hour out every six months...)

Jon

It is really quite odd how modern cars can have built in satnav but still can't work out what time zone they are in.

Paul

[9873210]

(We find changing the clock forwards and backwards too much of a challenge and leave it an hour out every six months...)

Jon

It is really quite odd how modern cars can have built in satnav but still can't work out what time zone they are in.

Paul

The global timezone database is ridiculously complex. It is derived not from natural laws or maths but from the whims of law makers in well over 100 countries, possibly pushing a thousand distinct legal systems once sub-national jurisdictions are counted. There are frequent changes, so reliable updates are needed. Every so often somebody does something crazy (like mandate solar time) that requires changing not just the data in the database but the implementation of the database.

An automated timezone system that gets it wrong is far worse than having to set the clock manually. I've had to work with systems that know just enough to keep resetting the clock based on rules that were outlawed ten years ago.