95 corolla charging problem

[strantor]

I'm working on my sister's corolla which is a hand me down from my mother, and finally from my grandmother. As I understand it, my grandmother had the alternator and battery replaced a few times during the time that she was driving it, my mother had it done once, and now it looks like it needs it again. All due to the same underlying problem (I assume) which has been plaguing this car for over 10 years. The car will run fine for a while, then it starts going through "spells" where the battery is always dead & always needs to be jump started. Sometimes even while it's running the battery will die & the car will die with it. This tells me that the alternator is dead, but I jumped the car just now and removed the pos terminal off the battery and it ran just fine. measured alternator output at a steady 14.45V. It seems as though there is something switching off the alternator once it senses that it has left the driveway. Right before it dies, all the lights on the dash flicker a few times and the engine does a little death rattle, then all is lost. Any Idea where I should look? I have the wiring diagrams and I noticed that seemingly every wire in the car goes through some unexplained "Integration relay" so I am considering that as a likely point of failure, also the computer. I don't even know where the integration relay is.

[strantor]

Also worth noting is that the car is equipped with a 10+ year old viper alarm system which begins to act screwy around the same time as the charging spells. The alarm will start going off while the car is driving down the road and once the battery drains below the point required for the car to drive, the alarm will continue going off (regardless of input from the clicker) until there is no juice left at all. It sounds like a dying robot in this phase.

I just rooted around under the dash looking for the Integration relay and came across some exposed stripped wires. I traced them back to the alarm unit and they go to a slot labeled "shock sensor". The wires arc and spark against each other (and presumably have been doing this for 10+ years) when they are touched. The car is not equipped with a shock sensor that I know of. I couldn't find one in the wiring diagrams, and didn't see anything that matched the description under the dash, so I removed them. I think this might have something to do with the problem.

[Bitter]

uninstall the alarm, see how it does then. just find the wires that its tapped into and un-tap them and seal them with tape, then find the wire that its spliced inbetween. thats the ignition wire, usually a larger wire. cut the alarm from that wire and join it back together, toss the alarm in the trash and tidy up any left over buts and clean it up with a bit of split loom.

[Rip The E Brake]

Bitter pretty much nailed it. The alarm is obviously drawing power...

Your suppose to remove the NEGATIVE cable to diagnose the alternator, not the positive.