Nothing is easy

[Henn28]

I spent yesterday installing my powered 10” kicker subwoofer in the right rear cubby. First I had to pull out all the oil, belts and sticks of various lengths (to support the windows when the regulators and clips crap out all too often). The install went surprisingly well and the sub adds a ton of depth to my bone stock speakers and amp. However, my alarm siren and arm/dearm “beep” isn’t working any longer. Always something with these cars. Hopefully someone may have seen this issue before and can help with troubleshooting, as this stuff makes me nervous to mess with since I feel I could brick my car somehow screwing around with the security stuff.

I tapped into the OEM alpine harness for the trigger (white wire, pin 10) and ran that to the sub across the back of the car with all the rest of the wire bundles that cross from left to right. Then I initially tried to tap into the positive terminal at the battery on the small nut under the removable cap. Not sure if this is the clamping mechanism, although it’s vertical orientation doesn’t makes sense as a clamp. I hope it isn’t because the stud snapped right off with what seemed like 1nm of force. I’ll deal with that somehow later….then I got smart(er) and used one of the positive terminals from the bus by the left rear air suspension reservoir and ran the wire around to the amp in the cubby. Some time later I had a power light on the amp with the key on and the kenwood booted up. The some time being after I realized I didn’t connect the ground, which I fixed by running it to a convenient stud holding the brake light unit to the frame. I was already using this spot successfully to ground my boyo backups camera.

My RCA cables then got hooked up to the amp and kenwood unit outputs (I had run them previously across the roof when I had the headliner out). Voila! Some great base to go along with Yacht Rock Radio on Sirius.

The only things I can think of are either that the alarm somehow needs the alpine OEM amp or somehow I broke a wire or connection running the trigger or power wire. The alpine pins were pretty corroded and I bent a couple trying to clean them. I got them straight enough (I think) to get all the speakers working again. But maybe I didn’t and somehow the alarm needs the amp? Or, there are lots and lots of wire bundles, connection blocks, etc running around the trunk so maybe I screwed one up.

The lights blink when the alarm is set off, but just no siren. Any thoughts on troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated. Also, a new battery positive cable is crazy money so I’m hoping I can just find the right size nut/bolt to fix my snapping the original off. I haven’t pulled the whole mess out yet to see what I’m dealing with though. Anyone seen this as well?

Power bus I ended up tapping into


Excuse the mess of wiring. Plan is to clean it up once I get the amp and speakers installed at some point.