Phantom Panic Alarm Activation

It's been at least two years since I was last here...so I found it necessary to rejoin. Actually, my visit is motivated by the fact that for the last two days the panic alarm in our 2005 #9 has been setting itself off...and it takes many attempts to turn it off for the command to "stick."

This is not a case of stooping down and having the fob press against something else in your pocket...both my fob and my wife's fob have been sitting on the kitchen counter. No one and no thing is touching them...yet the alarm will suddenly (and, typically, repeatedly) go off.

At this point I don't know whether it's a faulty fob(s) setting off the alarm or the alarm receiving a spurious signal and triggering itself. I read in the Knowledge Base here a reply to a question about a similar instance that said it was a "known" problem for a low charge in the 12v battery to falsely set of this alarm. That reply was posted back in 2005. Has two more years of experience in lots more cars shown this to actually be the case? Or have new possible causes surfaced?

 

Bill, thanks for the prompt reply. No, this just started happening yesterday, so I haven't yet had a chance to get to the dealer. We had a 2004 Prius for a little more than a year before we turned it in on this 2005...so we've had this car 2 years and 2 months. Is that about what you guys have found to be within the lifespan of these fob batteries?

 

Well, here's what's happened so far. Everybody in the neighborhood slept soundly because we took the fob under suspicion and moved it out of range. This morning, as I brought the fob closer to the car to take it to the dealer, the alarm started going off.

Once I got to the dealer, I talked to the service guy. He said he'd never heard of weak batteries in the fob setting off the car alarm. He was saying this to me as my car's alarm kept triggering as fast as I could press the button to turn it off (through about 4 cycles). He watched this and said he thought it was more likely that system in the car were at fault, not the fob. Of course, they were too busy to take me in today.

So I went to the Parts Dept, where they guys there said they, too, had never heard such a thing (but one of them remarked that he *had* heard of the doors locking by themselves). On top of that, they were out of the batteries for the fob. But they assured me that a) the battery needed was as common as dirt and B) was very cheap.

Later in the day I went to our local Batteries Plus. The alarm is going off as I explain to the guy what I need. I went ahead and replaced the batteries in both fobs. Sure enough, the battery in the "suspect" fob tested low (we forgot to test the battery in the other fob). And as soon as a fresh battery was in it, a small LED that's almost hidden on the fob started to flash intermittently. This went on for about two minutes (to our utter confusion) and then stopped (the other fob did not do this when its new battery was installed). My guess was that the fob was re-establishing itself with the car and exchanging who knows what kind of information.

From that point on, the alarm has not gone off...and the "suspect" fob has stayed well within range of the car...so I'm giving it every opportunity to set off the alarm. I'm not ready to bless it "fixed" just yet, but things look encouraging.

I decided to take this one step further and called the Toyota Customer Experience Center. I wanted to find out if they had received reports of low battery charge setting off the alarm. My thought was that if they had, my experience today showed they needed to communicate this to dealers. However, they made it unanimous -- the woman I spoke to put me on hold for a few minutes while she consulted with a tech rep and she came back on to tell me that he'd never heard of a report like that. However, they did docoment my experience so at least on episode of this happening is now on file.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Bill Merchant @ Jul 17 2007, 12:23 AM) [snapback]480055[/snapback]</div>

Not the NiMH battery pack! No, sir! Not ever B) !