grab a beer for this tale of woe

a few days ago I spilt a pint of water on myself whilst in the car. a twist cap came undone and drenched me, the seat and footwell carpet.
I dabbed it all with towels and as it was a nice day lowered all the windows a couple of inches and left it for eight hours.
in the evening I popped out on an errand and when I got back in the car to drive home there was dashboard infotainment but no clicking solenoid.

my lad arrived with a jump starter and it started straight away to allow my drive home.
as I was approaching home I saw a red low battery light flick up then gradually one by one all the dash lights came on in a cascade of faults. I limped home and realising that I must have significantly drained and ruined the battery by leaving the windows open for hours I ordered a replacement battery.

today the battery arrived so we refreshed the procedure by checking out the wiki and replaced the battery.

happy as larry I hopped in and drove to a local chippy to celebrate having my pride and joy back in service.

on the way back the infotainment screen went black, all the dashboard light lit up and my power steering failed.
I left it to rest for 10 mins and tried the key again and it started
I gingerly limped it to nearly home when it crashed out again and this time would not respond to the key in the ignition.

luckily it was only a short distance to home so popped back for tools and my IID tool.

I returned to the car and disconnected the battery terminals and did a hard reset. straight away the car woke so I popped the IID tool in and scanned, then reset the 41 fault codes then turned the key - success!

I drove home and as soon as this report is complete I shall celebrate with a GnT

I had something similar a few years ago on my 3.6 - turned out one of the terminals on the new battery was slightly smaller so I had to midfy the clamp to get a good connection, worth checking if it happens again

a follow on note regarding this

following the failure cascade my car displayed numerous problems to the degree I could not drive it safely.
steps
central locking
ride height
LPG
all failed along with other electrical gremlins

I couldn't find an auto electrician in the area so had a good read of the GAP IID manual and decided that restoring the CCF's would be worth a shot.

restored both and the car came back to life but no running boards.
a quick search on here showed me that the IID tool doesn't impact the steps as they are plug n play so I then searched for the instructions to the steps. 5 minutes later working deplorables.

I reckon owning an IID tool just saved me hundreds if not thousands of pounds

Good to know  2007 Vogue TDV8 in Zermatt Silver with Charcoal