Wet Carpets - C5

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Kowalski
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Wet Carpets - C5

Post by Kowalski »

After heavy rain I noticed that mat in the passenger footwell on my C5 was a little damp, lifiting it up revealed the carpet was soaking wet. The carpet in the rear footwells were just damp, not as bad as the passenger footwell however the drivers footwell is perfectly dry.

The carpets on the side of the footwells all seem dry, i.e. no sign of water getting past the door seals which also appear present and correct. The boot was dry too and the sloped part at the front of the passenger footwell was also dry.

There were a few leaves in the scuttle area so I removed them and checked the scuttle was in place, undamaged and fixed to the windscreen, it seems to be. My first Xantia got wet carpets with leaves in the scuttle and my second had wet carpets from a cracked scuttle, but the C5 doesn't seem to have enough leaves to block a drain or any obvious source of a leak.

This leaves me a little stumped, so I'll ask the question, does anybody have any more ideas of places to look for water getting in?
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Post by DickieG »

Door seals or a damaged plastic membrane inside the door card are the obvious places to look
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Post by myglaren »

The drain from the ventilation and air conditioning system may be clogged.
Pull the pollen filter and see if that is clogged or sodden.

Is there a smell of coolant in the cabin? :(
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Post by cachaciero »

Yes! I have had this problem though in my case it was the drivers side.
Bet you have an opening roof, if you haven't ignore the following.:-)

Hadn't had the car long but up to that time it had been as dry as a bone then one day after a night of heavy rain discovered that both the drivers and drivers side passenger foot well had substantial amounts of water in them.
After much digging around discovered that if the well around the roof opening gets full of water then the water will overflow and run under the roof trim to the top of the door seals where it then runs around the inside of the seals,drains under the metal sill footplate, under the carpet and ends up filling up the foot wells.

I guess that whichever side gets wet depends on which way the car is leaning, anyway rodding out the roof drains seems to have cured it, the roof drains actually exit at the rear of the front wheels so lots of scope for collecting crud even though they are behind the plastic shield. The drains run down the inside of the A pillar and exits to the outside of the car somewhere under the dash, when rodding mine I discovered that I couldn't get the rod past a point estimated to be where it exits the car and I suspect that the pipe is quite pinched so I had to attack it from both ends.
Given the amount of restriction in the pipe I suspect it wouldn't require much extra blockage to get to a point whereby the drains can't drain the water away quick enough so the roof well will overflow. I suspect that there may also be another scenario in that if water remains in the pipe and the freezes the drains will be blocked until thawed.

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Kowalski
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Post by Kowalski »

myglaren wrote:The drain from the ventilation and air conditioning system may be clogged.
Pull the pollen filter and see if that is clogged or sodden.

Is there a smell of coolant in the cabin? :(
There is no coolant smell and no sunroof to leak either.

I'll have a look at the pollen filter....
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Post by viorelovidiu »

I`ve had the same problem!

Under that grill of windscreen on both side are 2 large holes for drain. Mine on passenger side was a completely blockage with mud and branches. I used a cable to clear that drain hole and i solved water infiltration. `Cause of that blockage water was infiltrating throught air con which is on the passenger side.

Hope this would help you!

Ovidiu
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