Broken down help required

Oh dear woke up this morning to a non starting car, fortunately on my drive way.

Todays problem with the golf, it begging to start when you start the key, its on WOT, foot to the floor, and almost there but nothing. I try for a a little bit more and nothing. It just fails to fire.

I dig out my trusty multimater and the battery is reading 12.18v which is a bit low to jolt the starter I guess.

I have the battery on charge now and hoping this is the fault and its just been hammered with the heating, heated screen etc going.

Although I'm wondering if theres a electrical malfunction somewhere which is draining it ...? (obvious check, no lights or switches are on)

Its only just over 3 years old the battery, and just out of warranty, I'm thinking could it be the cold that has zapped it somehow ? ... or is it time to get a new battery as advised previously up in the thread by Adrian I think.

I'm wondering even if I charge it and its something else causing the drain, I'll be back in the same boat with a non starter.

Advice welcomed ? :)

(also I appreciate all the advice so far its been invaluable)

'WOT' will sort any flooding, but will likely make ordinary starting more difficult on a reasonably modern car.

Most reasonably recent cars are quite capable of maintaining enough battery charge to start the car the next day even after quite short journeys with everything on.

You can check for any draw on the battery with the engine stopped by inserting a DVM set to current measuring in one of the battery leads. But you may have to wait for some time for all the car electrics to go to sleep, as it were. And before that happens, there may be more current draw than your DVM will handle.

A normal reading with everything off would be approx 0.050 amps (50 milliamps). If the battery is draining overnight, I'd expect to see several amps.

What's it drop to whilst you're tring to start it?

Ford and Nissan use it to recover from a flooded situation; floor it and crank for 30 seconds, no fuel will be injected, then start normally.

Don't think VX have this strategy however.

Chris

I thought it common to most injection systems. Even the MegaSquirt on my SD1.

I'd be really surprised if they didn't. For instance GM, even on the really basic single point (central) injection fitted 20 years ago had a clear flood mode with more than 2/3 throttle angle on cranking.