leaving the ignition on - does it wreck the car (poss the coil?!?)

[janek]

hi, we need to leave my pil's fiat 500 ignition on for 24 hours in order to reset the radio so that we can enter the security code so that the radio will work.

my dad reckons this will burn out the coil, but now admits that this is a rumour he heard years ago, so i guess it may no longer be the case, if it ever was.

so, will we damage the car in any way if we leave the ignition on for 24 hours? not too worried about the battery cos it can be jump-started, i presume...

can you tell i know nothing about cars?!?

tia

somehow the radio got so it needed the security code put in. pils a)had the wrong code and b)didn't know how to enter it anyway.

if you enter the code wrongly the radio is blocked for a minute.

if you do it again it is blocked for two minutes.

and so on.

what with everyone sticking their oar in and thinking they know how to do it (including the guys who parked the car at pisa airport over a year ago, from which the radio is still blocked, even though they couldn't possibly have known the code - thanks fellas) the 'blocked' time is ages (it can be as much as 24 hours, fil doesn't think it'll be that long, but doesn't actually know).

but the countdown to unblocking only happens when the ignition is on. the car was just driven back from italy, but the 4-hour stints they were doing did not unblock the radio, so we want to leave in my parents' garage with the key in. if it won't cause permanent damage to the car.

so yes, i do mean one turn of the ignition. it is the coil (whatever that is...)that i'm worried about, not the battery, cos presumably we could jump start (couldn't we?) if the battery went flat (although it occurs to me now that if the battery were flat that wouldn't really count as having the ignition on).

any thoughts very welcome.

It wouldn't do anything to the coil. (the coil is used to store up and increase the current to enable the electrical energy to be enough to jump the gap between the electrodes of the spark plug thus creating the spark that burns the fuel) this only happens when the engine is running.
So would not be affected by ignition switch being on without the engine running, that would just drain the battery. In which case park it facing out of the garage so you can bump it/jump start it easier.

That said, battery won't last 24 hours without the engine running. Wouldn't recommend leaving car running without driving it as engine will overheat.

i wouldn't recommend leaving an engine running without driving for so many reasons i can't name them!!!

but thank you, alowVera, useful information.

teamedward i honestly never thought of that!

how long do you think the battery would last before it went flat?!?!?

Is there any reason you can't ring Fiat servicing and ask for the correct code? You'll have the VIN number which should be all they need. Surely that would be the easiest thing to do.

yes, we need to do that, but the radio is also blocked because the incorrect code has been entered so many times, so we need to wait till it unblocks, and as the length of blocking doubles each time we have ages to wait this time. the car was just driven back from italy and that mammoth journey did not lead to the radio being unblocked...

Buy a new one. Sounds like way too much faffing around.

so, we put the key in the ignition, turned it one click, left the car locked in my parents' garage and lo! after 4 hours the instruction changed from 'blocked' to 'enter code'.

which we didn't have.

so we put some details about the radio into some internet message board and a kind soul somehow calculated the pin. which we put into the radio and it worked. hooray.

it was surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, not sure) anti-climactic.

end of story. i love it when a plan comes together.

ps the car still started afterwards and there seemed to be no adverse effects from leaving the ignition on for 4 hours, despite my dad's dire warnings.

welldone! what a mission!