Please HELP with my alarm that keeps going off!

[Cannonball25]

I'm at my wits end here and would greatly appreciate anyone's help. The alarm on my 2003 Santa Fe has been going off at all hours of the night recently and I don't know what to do.

I live in a high-rise apartment building and park my Santa Fe in the lot below. Recently the alarm has been set off for no reason at all maybe 3 or 4 times a week, usually in the middle of the night. There's no one or no thing around at the time when this happens so it's obvious the thing is malcuntioning. My keyless remote that disarms the alarm won't reach down there from my balcony so I've been waking up and running downstairs at 4am to shut the thing off, no doubt pissing off a couple hundred neighbors.

The owner's manuel says that by pressing the "Lock" butten when exiting the car that this action arms the alarm. So I've stopped doing that and instead have been manually locking the doors but this doesn't seem to have solved my problem. I also took a look at the fuse box hoping to find the alarm fuse so I could rip it out but no such labeled fuse is in there.

Aside from taking a sledgehammer and swinging for the fences underneath that hood, I am now out of ideas. This has made me crazy and I'm sure my neighbors are ready to kick me out. Please, please, please, if anyone has any ideas at all how to permanently disarm this alarm or at least how to stop it from malfunctioning, I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks so much.

- Rob

[twospirits]

Okay, you have what I had a few years ago. It seems that no one else had this problem when I first mentioned it. The problem in my case (and most likely yours also) is the hood switch not being depressed. It seems that the hood switch (shown here on my Santy)


is pressed down by the rubber thingy (I call it a thingy, I believe its a grommet) on the underside of the hood. For some strange reason on my Santy the hood switch made an indentation on the rubber thingy (grommet), so much in fact that it does not press down the switch far enough to not set off the alarm. The fix is to have the dealership replace the rubber thingy (gromment), but since it happened to me on the weekend and my dealership was closed and I did not want to get linched by my neighbors, I did a quick diy fix shown below.



As you can see I place a screw in type of bolt in the rubber gromment. I just slit a cross/X on the gromment and screws in the bolt. This allows the hood switch to be depressed far enough so that it does not set off the alarm anymore.

Its funny, this is one modification that I never put up on my webpage and its one of the first ones that I did. You aren't the only one that has mentioned this problem before so I guess i'll put it up so other can find it. I'll reference this thread in the meantime.

TS out