Latest update folks and this time a real PITA problem to solve….
Went out to the car at the weekend and noticed that the windows were heavy with condensation on the inside… Passenger floor (front and rear) very wet… Frozen solid due to the cold, but wet nonetheless!.
With the sub zero temperatures my immediate thought was to a burst pipe… Heater matrix or similar..?? However after an hour or so hunting around.. no leaks to report. Only thing for it was trial and error of the next ‘most likely’ leak point..
The master stroke was checking the boot which was also very wet.. on the basis that water doesn’t flow uphill.. my guess was that the boot was letting in water (somewhere) and as my car drove out of the driveway (downhill), the water on the boot floor would flow into the footwells…
I’d then thought about what I’d been doing and what had changed on the kuga over the past month… the ONLY thing I could come up with was that I’d been using bikes via a rack on the roof bars… My car has had roof rails since new…
As a bike is mounted vertically on its rack, when you drive and go around corners, you create quite a lot of stress and bending moments where the roof bars joins into the car…. That was my logic anyway and gave me a start for which leak point to investigate.. trial and error remember!!!
Having stripped the boot interior out, I found the point where water was getting in, or dripping through, here
The plastic (silver) cover on the roof bars gently prises up… I warmed this slightly via a heat gun before I started to avoid the plastic being either brittle due to cold or age. Once removed, its simply 2(of) 10mm bolts to free the roof bar mounts…. Everything looked okay.. until you look REAL close…
The hole where the bolt mounts and passes through the roof is a slightly raised weld point.. this raised section is to stop water getting in! If you look close, you can se that a little bit of the raised section has broken away.. its only about 2mm long but that’s MORE than enough to let water in…
A good dry up with the heat gun and a generous application of clear silicone had this back together in 10mins…
I then left the car in the garage for 2x days with the gas heaters on to both help cure the silicone, also to help dry out the floor..
This can only just have happened as any condensation is immediately and clearly obvious.. If you do have a leak, work methodically and you'll manage to sort it.
The toughest part for me has been the temperatures.. too cold to run the hose, too cold to have the car thaw the ice and expose the hole.. too cold to dry the floor out and silicone cure!!
Very pleased to say that she’s all back together and bone dry after yesterdays rains. I'll have the carpets fully shampooed in the spring as a matter of course.