Posts Tagged ‘electrical’

Andy’s Citroen Xsara central locking goes bonkers! – But now fixed!

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

bonkers – a technical term for stopped working, or you walk away from the car, and it opens the doors again, and also my drivers electric window has stopped working!

A quick scoot over to the Citroen Xsara Owners’ Club, and quickly searching the Electrical forum, this seems to be a very common fault, where wires in the “door connector” have broken. A quote from the forum “Citroen acknowledged they’d used wire that was too thin and brittle many years ago.”.

A quick post, with the symptoms, just to get a response from Xsara Owner’s to confirm the issue, the problem was as follows:-

1. drivers door electric window does not open or close, using switch.

2.
a. when a key is used in drivers door lock does not open/close central locking on other doors.
b. when key is used to close passenger door, locks close and then open.
c. when remove is used to close doors, it opens again.

So, I had a few minutes today, it was not raining, so I thought I would have a quick look…a few broken small wires, must be easy to fix! I had expected to find two or more broken wires, to my surprise I found a single quite large (green with yellow bars) wire that had visibly broken, I checked all the other smaller wires, and none were found to be broken.

This large heavy guage wire, caused me a few issues, it must carry high current at this guage, so I used a heavy guage wire from an old UPS, and spliced and soldered the broken wires together as per  @The Wrinkly Ninja suggestion, this would also prevent the existing wire from breaking again. I had to use my high power soldering iron to “weld” the joints together, and then used heat shrink to seal the joints.

Door Wiring Connector on Citroen Xsara Phase 2

Door Wiring Connector on Citroen Xsara Phase 2

broken wire - green with yellow bars or spots

broken wire - green with yellow bars or spots

fix in progress - new yellow wire to join the broken wire

fix in progress - new yellow wire to join the broken wire

new wire soldered and jointed, heat shrinked

new wire soldered and jointed, heat shrinked

Thanks to @Captain Slow, @The Wrinkly Ninja and @Wheeler at the Citroen Xsara Owners’ Club, my central locking and electric window are working again.

Also Many Thanks to JLB Electronics, for the heat shrink and heat gun. Reliable, fantastic prices, quickly delivery and do not rip you off on postage! The new Maplins for the 21st Century!

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