I finished installing a remote starter on my Cutlass Ciera. The car has power locks and trunk release, so I was looking forward to having the remote entry as much as the remote start.I bought an Autostart AS-2775 on eBay for $51 (with a free Harbor Freight DMM, which turned out to be fairly nice). As it turns out, most of the remote starter brands are owned by Directed Electronics now, so it probably doesn't matter what brand it is. But it did come with very well-written and thorough installation and user manuals.
Armed with my factory service manual, I started by tracking down all the necessary wires. This wasn't too hard with the factory manual, but it took quite a while to remove all the necessary dash and kick panels, as well as find good locations to tap into each wire. After finding all the locations to tap, I stripped an inch of insulation from each wire, soldered on the appropriate wire from the remote starter harness, and taped it up with Scotch Super 33.
One problem I ran into is that the remote starter had only negative triggers (maximum 500 mA to ground) for unlock, lock, and trunk. My car uses positive triggers for each. So I ended up converting polarity with three relays.
I also installed the included hood pin, which disables the remote starter when the hood is open (to prevent Nancy from sucking me into the serpentine belt with the remote). That turned out to be the only wire that needed to go through the firewall, and I used an existing grommet.
After getting everything properly secured behind the dash, I programmed and tested the remote starter, and put everything back together. It's been working great so far, and I can even start it from across campus. Plus, I get a kick out of the second-lock horn confirmation. Chicks dig it.
Anyway, Josh's hints for a successful remote starter install:
- Budget two days for installation. You'll probably run into snags.
- Get a factory service manual for your car. It's invaluable for wiring locations, connector pin-outs, drawings of connector locations, and instructions for taking the dash apart without breaking everything.
- Print out the full installation manual for the remote starter. The printed installation guide that came with mine was a quick-start guide. I found a PDF of the full manual on the manufacturer's website, and it was very helpful.
- Check whether you need positive or negative triggers for things like door locks, trunk release, horn, etc. Either buy a remote starter with the correct outputs, or round up some extra relays.
- Take the time to do it right. Solder connections, use good electrical tape or heat-shrink tubing where possible, zip tie the wiring harness to keep it away from stuff that moves or is sharp. You'll end up making enough other compromises that you won't want to feel lousy about cutting corners elsewhere.
- Don't do something stupid like bypassing the hood pin. Chances are I'll buy your crappy car some day and lose my fingers in the cooling fan.
- Vacuum the floor of your car before you start crawling around on it.
