Brrrrrr, its cold over here

Winter has come.

Monday morning saw me venture off to work in -1 degree celcius. This morning it was -2 degrees celcius.

Very quickly I have become adept at scraping ice off the windshield, and other windows, before being able to drive to work. The car has a thermometer showing the outside temperature as I drive. Coming home it hasn't been much better. The car showed it being 0 degrees when I left work at High Wycombe this evening.

Our house though has been kept warm thanks to the central heating. We have it pretty well figured out now.

As for the rest of winter, while the Met Office has said that it will be a significantly colder than average winter - perhaps the coldest in 50 years other forecasters have said that winter will only be slightly colder than average - barely noticeable. At present we have a 50% chance of having a white Christmas.

TDC TBC

OK. So I took the car back to the dealer yesterday with it stalling three times along the way. Oh what fun on London's roads.

The good news, so the dealer has told me, is that they appear to have figured out what was wrong. It was a faulty connection to the TDC sensor in the engine. The connection is now fixed. I am waiting on confirmation that the car now runs OK for more than 10 minutes. If so, I will pick it up this morning and then head into work. If not? I don't know. Throw something at someone, I think.

And what does a TDC sensor do? The TDC stands for 'Top Dead Centre" and it obviously is very important for the car to run properly. :)

Seriously, though, here is an extract from a document I found online:

The TDC system consists of the TDC sensor with integrated
TDC signal amplifier and TDC power supply. It is used for the
dynamic determination of the top dead centre position (TDC)
in piston engines.

Knowledge of the exact top dead centre is of great importance
for investigating processes occurring inside engines,
since all measurements are recorded against crank angle and
with respect to TDC. With some thermodynamic quantities
such as average indicated pressure (pmi), a deviation of only
0.1° crank angle from the true top dead location already
results in an error of several percentage points in the pmi
value.

The advantage of direct determination of TDC, compared
with determining the position of pressure maximum from the
motored-engine pressure curve, is that there is then no need
for a correction involving the degree of the thermodynamic
loss angle.

http://www.kistler.com.cn/pdf/2629e-12.01.pdf