Hey guys,

I bought my 89 240 used last year for $1100 with roughly 300k miles on it. It's an amazing car and perfect for me because I am a student. It drives very smoothly, looks awesome, and is great on gas. However, I have been having some problems with it recently.

The locks on my doors haven't been working. When I turn the key in the driver's door, only the lock for that door rises, and the other three remain locked. I need to pull them up by hand. If I don't, they stay locked while I am driving but sometimes pop up all at once randomly, or if I hit a bump. Also, when I lock the car from the outside, only my door will lock. I need to push down the other three locks with my hand.

Over the summer, my car started dying overnight. It would run great that day, but when I would return to it in the morning, it wouldn't start. I've had to jump that car about five times now.

I replaced the battery last month, but the car is dying about once a week or once every other week now. It sucks. This morning, it is so dead that when my boyfriend jumped it with his 2006 Honda Accord, it nearly killed his battery and ended up resetting his radio. My car never started and he needed to give me a ride to school.

What should I do? I think the power locks might be draining the battery but I don't know how to diagnose or fix that. Please help!!

 

Remove fuse 8 - if the battery drain goes away then you have pretty much isolated it to the power locks.

 

until you figure it out, i would suggest disconnecting the battery at night so it doesn't destroy your new battery
i would remove fuse #8, then put a test light between its 2 terminals. if the bulb lights up, its drawing power and would appear to be your problem.
if its not your problem, do the same on all the other fuses (key off). nothing should be drawing power when everything is turned off, if something is, you're on your way to finding your problem.

 

The Door Lock circuit is also for the dash clock; it will draw some current even with everything off (Having this same problem with a replacement door)

 

Thanks for the help everyone. My dad and I are going to look at it right now. We've unscrewed multiple panels and we've bought two new relay switches to replace the old ones. Also, the last time my car died (Thursday), the fuse to my stereo blew out so we had to replace that.

I'll check back when we do some diagnostics.

Thanks again everyone All I want is to be cruising around in my Volvo again, haha. I just bought two 4" Alpine speakers for the front doors to match the big ones I have in the back too.

 

Well, I dug into the door, and it turns out the unlock circuit on the internal door lock has the bio-degradable wiring -- and was mostly gone; even with that wire removed, there is a plastic ring for the key lock/unlock and I suspect it was not in the place it should've been, and had shorting issues as well. Ended up unplugging all the wires there; will likely install a 3-pos momentary switch in the dash, wired to the relays behind the dash so I can do it from inside at least. (It can sit next to the OD switch installed there, since the whole **** was missing when I got mine)