Wet Floor

[kevvrs_130]

Took the mat out from behind the passenger seat today to lift some rubbish(found a tenner too!) and discovered the carpet is soaking. Any ideas??

Thanks

[Huxley vRS]

Rear door seals mate, search for it on the site its common on all fabia's

[kevvrs_130]

Rear door seals mate, search for it on the site its common on all fabia's

Good on ya. Searched for wet floor but nothing really came up. Apologies if this annoyed anyone

[Huxley vRS]

Most of us like to help haha.

Make sure you lift the carpet and dry it correctly, you dont want any chance of it rusting!

I sealed mine before they leaked because i knew if i didnt it would happen one day lol, took me about 1 hour to do both doors

[kevvrs_130]

Most of us like to help haha.

Make sure you lift the carpet and dry it correctly, you dont want any chance of it rusting!

I sealed mine before they leaked because i knew if i didnt it would happen one day lol, took me about 1 hour to do both doors

Good stuff, I'll need new seals then. Seats out job then to lift and dry carpet?

[mark.r.cullen]

Good stuff, I'll need new seals then. Seats out job then to lift and dry carpet?

New carrier seals is too much hassle to be honest, and given the common-ness of this fault probably won't last long before they go again.

Get yourself some sealant, drain as much water from the existing carrier seals as possible, and go around with a sealant. I went around the edge of the carrier and pressed as hard as I could with a lot of paper towels handy to soak it up - the amount of water that came from the (foam looking?) carrier seal was quite mad. I pressed the sealant in to the carrier edge / groove / dip just using my thumb. There should be a thread about it in the big handy super awesome sticky thread.

Did both rear and front on mine last year and have had zero problems since - had never used a sealant / skeleton gun before in my life

[kevvrs_130]

New carrier seals is too much hassle to be honest, and given the common-ness of this fault probably won't last long before they go again.

Get yourself some sealant, drain as much water from the existing carrier seals as possible, and go around with a sealant. I went around the edge of the carrier and pressed as hard as I could with a lot of paper towels handy to soak it up - the amount of water that came from the (foam looking?) carrier seal was quite mad. I pressed the sealant in to the carrier edge / groove / dip just using my thumb. There should be a thread about it in the big handy super awesome sticky thread.

Did both rear and front on mine last year and have had zero problems since - had never used a sealant / skeleton gun before in my life

Cheers for that info. How'd you dry under the carpets?. So a trip to B&Q for some sealant is in order, any particular one?

[Chris Coates]

gutter sealant is always good.

[mark.r.cullen]

Cheers for that info. How'd you dry under the carpets?. So a trip to B&Q for some sealant is in order, any particular one?

I used something recommended by Moggy, as his advice has always been spot on. I can't quite remember the name of it though, got it from Homebase of B&Q (quick google for 'briskoda moggytech sealant' suggests Unibond 3 in 1 )... other people have recommended most gutter sealants to be up to the job.

I didn't actually dry the carpets as they didn't seem wet (confirmed when ripping the interior out one time - must have got lucky). Could use a dehumidifier if you can get hold of one to borrow though.

Edited 7 October, 2011 by mark.r.cullen

[Huxley vRS]

I used sikaflex?! i think its spelt they do it in black and with me having black fabia looks almost oem keep your heater on the feet setting and have the temp up high as there is a duct right under the front seat facing into the rear it will heat the carpet up nicely.

[DRJ]

Took the mat out from behind the passenger seat today to lift some rubbish(found a tenner too!) and discovered the carpet is soaking. Any ideas??

1. Have a read through this topic - http://briskoda.net/forums/topic/2158-warning-fabia-door-leaks/ - I'd have thought with that many postings you'd have heard all about this problem by now. Note it's the CARRIER seals that usually fail NOT the DOOR seals. There's very good video link in there somewhere.

2. Both front and rear doors can leak making the carpets wet - but it's more likely to be the rears I believe. Rear door cards are easier to get off too - watch the video.

3. Water can travel between front and rear footwells hence the need really to check all doors.

4. The tell-tail sign is water on top of the door seal when you open a door.

5. On my car the rear doors turned out to have already been sealed but the idiot who did it also added additional self-tapping screws to better join the carrier to the door - but then failed to seal those! So water was pouring through the screw holes !!!!!

6. Best sealant to use is "Plumbers Mate" from Toolstation - cheaper than the Sika alternative. Gutter sealant is OK though more messy. Ordinary silicone is NOT OK unless you dry everything out TOTALLY - and since the carrier seal is foam that's tricky.

7. Having resealed the rear doors on mine I found the driver's footwell still full of water - and the front door wasn't leaking in the usual place. I think I solved it when I found the door seal wasn't fully pushed home onto the metal fin supporting it in the door mirror area and that was letting in water at that point. I'm hoping the problem doesn't reoccur this winter.

8. I believe to get the underfelt TOTALLY dry you need to take the seats out, lift the carpet, cut the underfelt out and - in my case - dry it over the central heating boiler for several days. The problem is it has an impervious rubber topping and getting the moisture out from under that proved impossible. Others claim to have succeeded with powered or non-powered dehumidifiers but I don't have the former and the latter didn't work for me. To take the seats out you need a special bit - details elsewhere here.

9. Good luck!

[anewman]

Another possibility is the rear screenwash pipe, particularly as this is the passenger side. This can leak into the footwell, even if screenwash appears at the rear screen, as I found from experience. I think if there's a noticeable delay between spraying the screenwash and it appearing at the rear, chances are it has come undone. Simply a case of removing the trim that goes from the rear deck to the door entry trim, locating the pipe, locating the join, and pushing the pieces together until there's a satisfying click.

BTW I wondered where that tenner went (had to try, lol).

[DRJ]

Good point - but you'd have to be operating the washer an awful lot to get the carpets wet... :wonder:

[anewman]

Good point - but you'd have to be operating the washer an awful lot to get the carpets wet... :wonder:

The pumps seem to operate at quite a high pressure, and water comes out of a leak in a pipe faster than it does from the jet directed at the rear screen, plus once you have sprayed it the contents of the pipe also empty into the footwell - leading to a small delay in spraying - and if there's a delay in spraying, you're spraying it longer too. For as long as mine was leaking the 2 litre screenwash seemed to go down *very* fast.

I noticed mine got far more noticeably wet after spraying it quite a bit to adjust the jet position.

[nick261188]

I used sikaflex?! i think its spelt they do it in black and with me having black fabia looks almost oem keep your heater on the feet setting and have the temp up high as there is a duct right under the front seat facing into the rear it will heat the carpet up nicely.

i would use sikaflex to its good and strong stuff we use it at work to bond bus windows in so its got to be strong

[Bezzy]

Seats out isn't really necessary IMO, but I don't know a lot about the underfelting etc as I've never taken my carpet out. Once sealed (or curtained), drive round with the aircon on for a bit, as this acts as a dehumidifier in itself. It will stop the condensation, and that's all I was worried about to be honest. Get it fixed before the cold weather sets in, as it becomes a nightmare in winter when you start getting ice on the inside of your windscreen!

If they start leaking again after sealing, just check for holes in the sealant and go over them again, as mine have been done a few times as the water keeps getting through. The job isn't too much trouble to be honest, it's just having the right tools more than anything!

Good luck!

[anewman]

i would use sikaflex to its good and strong stuff we use it at work to bond bus windows in so its got to be strong

Which is good until you need to remove the stuff to get the carrier off to replace the glass or fix the window mechanism. Roof and gutter sealant should work and be relatively easy to remove when needed.

[Bezzy]

Which is good until you need to remove the stuff to get the carrier off to replace the glass or fix the window mechanism. Roof and gutter sealant should work and be relatively easy to remove when needed.

Roof and gutter sealant isn't that easy to remove. Not unless you have some white spirit anyway, or so I'm told Just ask Softscoop, he helped me to take my old sealant off and put a new layer on! It's fine anyway, as long as you're not the one that has to replace the glass or window mechanism!!

[Patriot1]

I sealed my doors today, i used roof and gutter seal cos it stay's soft and never goes off so it won't part from the door. You will need to apply it using a silicon gun

just cut the nozzle to make it a little bigger when coming out the tube, i had some builder's wipes which i got at the same time, they're great for cleaning the stuff up

and are also good for oil too.

As for the water in the foot well, i had my car parked facing uphill (on a hill)

which made the water run to where your heal sits, using a sponge i soaked up as much as i could with pressing my fingers into the carpet and just repeat until it's about gone.

The rest will dry up but will take a little time, seeing as it's fairly wintery outdoors ya'll prob have the heater on anyway

[DRJ]

Something to bear in mind - the rear underfelt has no rubber topping - that area dried out easily. It's the front underfelt that does have the rubber topping.

[Dave1953]

I used to suffer badly from wet rear floors in my Fabia, even after replacing the sealant on the door carrier seals. However, it was while replacing the sealant again with simple household self-adhesive 'P' type rubber draughtproofing seal (an idea I had that this would make a better job of it) that it dawned on me that the problem was not caused by leaky seals themselves, but by the water running through the inside of the door being unable to drain away quickly enough whenever it rained. This happens, I think, because the weather seals around the tops of the doors appear to channel so much water around the tops of the wheel arches to the door sills that it forms a continuous pool between the sills and the undersides of the door outer edges. Atmospheric pressure and meniscal or capillary forces then act to dam up the water inside the doors by preventing it from getting out of the drain holes at the bottom of the door edges.

The answer, it appeared, was simply to stop, or reduce, the flow of water over the rear wheel arches to allow the water inside the doors to drain out quickly enough. All I did to effect the solution was stick two 50mm lengths of P-strip directly under the weatherseal at each side of the car, on the narrow, curving, outward-facing lip (not the wider, flat, forward-facing area). This just effectively extends the wetherseal to the point at which the body/door curvature turns downward more steeply, and makes rainwater run back to the outside of the body rather than between the rear of the door and the wheel arch. If I haven't explained this very well, just try it anyway and see if it works for you. I did this simple mod about 16/17 months ago and the car has been dry ever since, whereas it previously only took a moderate shower to have water in pools on the rear footmats. Incidentally, I ended up only replacing the carrier seal on the RH rear door with P-strip, and left the LH one (the more leaky one) as it was, to test my theory out and see what happened, but the fact that both footwells are now permanently dry would indicate that the door carrier seals were never the root cause of the problem in the first place! The reason some cars may be prone to wetness whilst others are dry is probably due to the height at which the rear doors were attached during manufacture - the cars with the doors set slightly higher will have a larger gap under the drain holes, just enough the prevent the ponding and capillary action from occurring and allowing water inside the doors to flow away freely.

I'm sorry if I sound like a mad scientist, but I think my simple solution appears to have identified and cured the cause of the problem, rather than just temporarily hiding the symptoms of it, and the job only takes two minutes to do (instead of 2-3 hours).

(PS - I've added a photo to the gallery (p6), as I couldn't see how to attach it directly to the post.)

Edited 9 October, 2011 by Dave1953

[peterpickles]

Thanks for the info. It seems like a good idea

I can not see your photo on Page 6 of the gallery, please can you upload it again if possible.

I used to suffer badly from wet rear floors in my Fabia, even after replacing the sealant on the door carrier seals. However, it was while replacing the sealant again with simple household self-adhesive 'P' type rubber draughtproofing seal (an idea I had that this would make a better job of it) that it dawned on me that the problem was not caused by leaky seals themselves, but by the water running through the inside of the door being unable to drain away quickly enough whenever it rained. This happens, I think, because the weather seals around the tops of the doors appear to channel so much water around the tops of the wheel arches to the door sills that it forms a continuous pool between the sills and the undersides of the door outer edges. Atmospheric pressure and meniscal or capillary forces then act to dam up the water inside the doors by preventing it from getting out of the drain holes at the bottom of the door edges.

The answer, it appeared, was simply to stop, or reduce, the flow of water over the rear wheel arches to allow the water inside the doors to drain out quickly enough. All I did to effect the solution was stick two 50mm lengths of P-strip directly under the weatherseal at each side of the car, on the narrow, curving, outward-facing lip (not the wider, flat, forward-facing area). This just effectively extends the wetherseal to the point at which the body/door curvature turns downward more steeply, and makes rainwater run back to the outside of the body rather than between the rear of the door and the wheel arch. If I haven't explained this very well, just try it anyway and see if it works for you. I did this simple mod about 16/17 months ago and the car has been dry ever since, whereas it previously only took a moderate shower to have water in pools on the rear footmats. Incidentally, I ended up only replacing the carrier seal on the RH rear door with P-strip, and left the LH one (the more leaky one) as it was, to test my theory out and see what happened, but the fact that both footwells are now permanently dry would indicate that the door carrier seals were never the root cause of the problem in the first place! The reason some cars may be prone to wetness whilst others are dry is probably due to the height at which the rear doors were attached during manufacture - the cars with the doors set slightly higher will have a larger gap under the drain holes, just enough the prevent the ponding and capillary action from occurring and allowing water inside the doors to flow away freely.

I'm sorry if I sound like a mad scientist, but I think my simple solution appears to have identified and cured the cause of the problem, rather than just temporarily hiding the symptoms of it, and the job only takes two minutes to do (instead of 2-3 hours).

(PS - I've added a photo to the gallery (p6), as I couldn't see how to attach it directly to the post.)

[Dave1953]

Thanks for the info. It seems like a good idea

I can not see your photo on Page 6 of the gallery, please can you upload it again if possible.

The gallery actually seems to be broken at the moment. My pic is now listed on p7, but all pages from the end of 6 onwards are blank. According to the help page, I should be able to attach files to my posts, but there doesn't seem to be a way of actually doing that! If you send me a PM I'll email you the pic directly instead.

Regards,

Dave

Amendment - see image here:

Edited 11 October, 2011 by Dave1953

[E11HES]

take the seats out, take the felt out and put that straight in the bin, dry the carpets out in the house, either letting them air somewhere and dry with hair dryer, then back in jobs a good en. i just keep pulling the back carpets up every now and then to check for dampness.

Im convinced you will never completely solve the water problem in the fabia, and there will always be condensation and steamy windows from dampness somewhere in the car lol

[Dave1953]

take the seats out, take the felt out and put that straight in the bin, dry the carpets out in the house, either letting them air somewhere and dry with hair dryer, then back in jobs a good en. i just keep pulling the back carpets up every now and then to check for dampness.

Im convinced you will never completely solve the water problem in the fabia, and there will always be condensation and steamy windows from dampness somewhere in the car lol

Laugh and scoff all you want, mate - mine doesn't suffer any more, and it lives in the open! Feel free to come and inspect it yourself anytime you like when you are passing by York. I'll even let you use my hosepipe to see if you can get water inside! I went through all the usual nightmares after I bought the car - soaking carpets, puddles on the floor, extreme condensation on the windows, ice on the inside etc., and tried most of the "cures" in the Forum without success. However, the car stood outside throughout last winter's arctic conditions without a trace of condensation inside, which shows just how dry it now is! Sometimes, the simplest solutions work best - they just need to be found!!

Edited 11 October, 2011 by Dave1953