New used truck - couple of questions

[Lucy's Driver]

I drove home a 2006 supercab/long bed Lariat package PSD yesterday. 25,000 miles, and it was in decent shape. Some minor body damage to the bed, no big deal. I bought it from Lighthouse Ford in Long Island. They were OK on price and would not budge on it, but overall it was a good experience. I had a laundry list of stuff I wanted them to fix on the truck, and they did take care of all of it. A lot of the stuff was not warrantee either.

I picked it up from the dealer, drove through Manhattan to pick up our dogs at our apartment, and continued on out to our cabin in PA where the truck will be stored and used primarily as a tow vehicle for a boat and for a rockcrawler built Jeep on a car carrier. The dogs loved hanging their heads out the open rear window on the highway.

One of two aftermarket things I can find that the prior owner did was to put in a remote starter. I would not have even known except I happened to randomly hit the right sequence on the key fob. When taking out the fuse box to install the Ford upfitter switches and do the high idle mod (hard area to work in, but overall an easy mod that works great) for it I saw the stuff for it tucked high up under the dash.

A couple of questions:
Any reason I can't pull the fuse for the starter relay, rig a switch and an inline fuse with a couple of blade style wire connectors into the socket for that fuse, and mount the switch somewhere hidden as a kill switch as a security measure. Will this throw a code?

I read the thread in the tech folder about the door chime. My door chime is on all the time the driver's door (only) is open, key in the ignition or not. Is this normal or does it have something to do with the aftermarket stuff I mentioned above? I want to kill it but am concerned about screwing with the aftermarket stuff.

The mirrors have the marker lights on them. How do I get at the lights? They are all working but I did notice that once of the light covers is cracked, I want to replace that eventually. There are no bolts or anything on the outside. I did notice that if you turn the mirror enough there are some bolts visible under the mirror. Does the light cover just pop out somehow or is it more complicated?

For long term storage I will be hooking this up to a trickle charger. I assume that hooking only one of the batteries up does it? It looks like the alternators run only to one battery, so if they charge both that way the trickle charger should, but I don't know if there is some kind of disconnect that kicks in when the truck is off as a battery saver kind of feature.

BTW I really dodged a bullet on the garage situation: I measured my rather small garage before buying and concluded that the truck would just barely fit. When I pulled in the driveway I realized that I did not notice that the roof of the grarage and the rain gutter on it actually hang down lower than the top of the garage door. The truck's roof clears by literally a quarter inch. The only problem I'm going to have is that I'm going to have to make sure that in the winter the driveway right in front is stripped down to the blacktop, its that close a fit. Either that or air down the tires, but I'd prefer not to do that.

The other thing the prior owner did was put in a back up alarm like on heavy construction trucks. Not so good in our neighborhood at 4 am on a weekend, and I will be backing it out that early at times. Its just a parasite type snap on clip (don't know the right name for it) wired into the back up lights wire. I actually do want it at times, so I'm going to try to use the other low power upfitter switch to run a wire back to a relay mounted in the rear next to the alarm to be able to turn it on when I want it. Anyone know the best way to get a wire from the cab through the firewall?

[bigredtruckmi]

The mirror markers are a one piece assembly.

For the battery. use trickle charger but have it come on once a week so as to not overcharge battery. Yes the batteries are connected together.

Your garage can be a big problem in winter. Remember that the frost will go into the bare ground and raise it up. So with your very close tolerance I would have 1. either park it outside in winter or 2. Change the door and gutter. 3. lower the floor somehow.
4. Lowering the tires would work but if you forget to pump up every morning and deflate every evening you could have problems by tire problems or at the other end hitting the garage. PS my wife wouldn't like to do that one (#4).

[Sarge261]

Buy a Battery Tender it will maintain a charge and will not over charge the batteries. Its simple to hook up and not that expensive like 30 bucks.

There is a bundle of wires on the driver side of the engine compartment. These lead right into the cab. I beleive that you need to take the interior fuse box out to get to the wires. I am sure others will chime in on that.

Good luck and enjoy it.

Sarge