False Car Alarm

[jerryho]

My factory alarm has been acting up today and it's been causing me a lot of headache since it disturbs everybody at work and the neighbors at home.

For some unknown reason, the alarm keeps triggering. I've never had the problem before, the only thing that is drastically different with today is "rain." I don't know if this car has a shock sensor or something, but its really not raining hard enough for that.

FYI:

I know when I purchased the car, it did not come with a keyless entry. So ocasionally when I put in the key to the driver's side door, the alarm would trigger -- i think there's a TSB on this. Ever since that, i've purchased the factory keyless to avoid this problem .. never had a problem since then.

What could this be? Is there anyway I can disable the "alarm" portion of the car and just use the keyless entry ?

 

[DonDavis]

Jerry, very common problem on the early cars... If you're hands-on it's an easy and free (but tedious) fix, otherwise it's about $150 in parts and more in labor...

Inside the door on the lock cylinder is a lever which actuates a switch housed in plastic... that switch is what tells the factory alarm to arm itself or turn off. What happens is that humidity accumulates, corrodes the copper contacts, and you can guess the rest of the story. It drove me nuts for months when I got mine.

The parts are about $80 each, I think plus a good bit of labor to install, OR

you can do what I did and yank the silly things out, clean them, tweak them close them back up and seal them with epoxy, then reinstall them. I've not had any problems with mine since, not once. But it's inside the door and it's a pain...

Shoot me a note if you want more details. You can also do a search on "factory alarm" or something to dredge up the procedure, I think it's out there somewhere...

Don