Ok. 98 Civic, Clifford alarm with remote start. Nothing out of the ordinary prior to this going on. All of a sudden when I turn my key to the on position nothing happens. Well if you just leave it on the on position the cars power comes on, dash lights, radiator fan comes on, etc.. For about a second then turns off again. It does this for as long as the ignition is in the on position.

After playing around with it for a while I find that if I remove a fuse that is at the negative terminal on the battery (which belongs to the alarm) it will stop turning on and off. Well, I disconnect all the wires that connected to the battery and re-connected them, to make sure they were all good. All of a sudden the car starts working fine. And I thought situation over... well

My car hasen't been used for about a month and I go out to start it up today and it dosen't come on.. Battery dead. I hook up jumper cables to it and juice it with another auto. The car is doing the same thing as before but now it only stays on for about half a second and it does it every 2 seconds instead of about 5. I'm thinking that it was doing it even without the key in the on position! I'll have to verify. But now I'm stumped again.

Any suggestions guys? Help would be greatly appreciated.

 

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did you have the alarm installed or did you buy the car with it? is the alarm still hooked up? it sounds like you disabled the alarm from the battery, but there could still be something attached to the ignition-on wire under the steering column.

 

How old is your battery?

 

i'm thinkin that the ignition wire under the column was spliced into for the alarm as .. some are done this way as a type of anti-theft system.

whats the history on this alarm & who put it in.. check your wires comming off the key switch.. there are about 4-6 of them.. make sure nothing is grounding it self out either.. this could cause power loss of the battery or shorting of the battery... good luck

 

Battery is about 2 years old. It could use replacing but a bad battery isn't going to cause it to turn on and off.

I bought the alarm separately from one of those big name guys.

If I can't get it figured out from the help here I'm going to rent one of those car tower things from U-Haul and take it to a shop

Keep the suggestions coming, one might just turn out to be the right one.
Thanks