Wet Interior in Your Car or Truck How to Find Leaks and Clean Them Up

Okay, we're here. Everybody put your windows up. All right. Oh, oh, great. It's everywhere. Great. Man, it's everywhere. Oh, geez.

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So in today's video, I want to talk to you about a few reasons that I could think of, of why you might potentially have water inside of your passenger compartment. Now on a nice big black truck like this, you can imagine just how hard it's gonna get inside of the passenger compartment of the actual vehicle itself. Commonly, people are gonna wanna put on these nice window louvers, they come across just like this. Why do they want them on there? Well, maybe because they like to have their windows open a crack, but still have it protected from any of this debris that might make its way inside, such as may be moisture, or even some dust that might happen to kick up. Now when I first got this truck, of course, I wanted to make sure that I had the window louvers put on, and that looks great and it actually works great, but that's generally only for a short period of time. But, of course, if it's been on there for a longer period of time, like this one right here, you can tell that the adhesive itself has actually broken down over time. And this right here is gonna cause a major issue, especially if you were to leave your windows down.

Okay. So now you can tell if it was raining or even a downpour outside, I left this window down expecting my window louvers to do their job. Well, what just happened inside this thing? Now the inside of my door panel is completely soaked. If you have any electronics like this one right here, like a master window switch, or even a lock switch on it, if moisture makes its way inside of the circuit board, that's gonna cause a major issue and, of course, the window might not work or even the locks themselves. Not to mention, there's other things that are involved that you wanna pay attention to. It might have potentially gotten up onto the dash somehow, or even, of course, filled up the entire floorboard of your car. Any of this is very bad. And, of course, if you have power seats, they could potentially get ruined as well.

Obviously, having cloth seats, having them wet like this isn't gonna be very good. The next thing that you need to do at this point is to go ahead and try to vacuum off as much of this as you can and try to dry it off. Any of this moisture that's left on here, or even inside where it soaks into the cushion could potentially cause mold or worse. Oh, finally, the rain is over, I can get out of here. Oh, I'm not getting in there. Now, obviously, getting into a car like this isn't necessarily the best idea. The mold spores that are building up inside of this passenger compartment could potentially get airborne and, of course, make their way into my lungs, especially if I was driving around with the windows down. Obviously, if the interior look like this one right here, it's not necessarily something that I'm gonna be able to clean on my own, even if I had specialty detergents or even cleaners.

Just using a vacuum and trying to suck out any of the moisture that might be inside there isn't necessarily gonna get off all the mold that's on the interior. Something like that, more than likely you're gonna have to do a complete redo of the interior there, new seat upholstery, new carpeting, new a whole bunch of different things. Other than that, you might potentially be able to call a cleaning service of some sort. But if it's this bad, it doesn't make any sense. Now the next place that I wanna talk about where water might potentially make its way inside the passenger compartment might be down along the floor here. Maybe you have a rotted floorboard, maybe you're jacking it up underneath and you potentially broke it in some way. Either way, if you're driving out in the rain, splashing in some of those puddles like we all like to do, water or moisture could have made its way up and into the floor panel here. And, of course, it's gonna accumulate and then, of course, it will drain out over time, but it's still gonna be wet. So let's see if there's any damage under here. Oh, yeah, you can see there's definitely damage under there.

[Vocalization] Hello. Okay. So now the next thing that I wanna talk to you about is if you happen to have a sunroof on your particular vehicle. If you have one, of course, there's gonna be area where the moisture is gonna need to go into and it needs to actually be able to drain out of this area. If it doesn't, it's gonna puddle up inside this channel here and it's gonna make its way out somewhere typically, inside your passenger compartment. Now looking at this right along here, you can tell exactly where all the debris and leaves happen to make their way to. If I stick my finger in there carefully and move it all out of the way, I can see exactly where the drain hole is for this side. And to be honest with you, there's gonna be another one over on the other side. It's most common to have the debris in these two areas because as the water makes its way down, it's gonna channel all the debris that's coming with it down towards those drain holes and, of course, once it plugs it up, the water is gonna sit in there. And like I said, it needs to make its way out at some point.

So if you do happen to find that you have moisture coming inside your passenger compartment from up around where your sunroof might be, of course, you're gonna wanna open it up, check around those drain holes, and if you see any debris inside there, just go ahead and make sure you clean it out. And when you clean it out, you need to make sure you clean the entire channel all the way across. Any of this debris right here could potentially make its way back down to the drain hole and cause an issue again. I can get this for you. Got it.

There you go, pal. Oh, oh, no, this was a horrible idea. Now, why is this one important to show you? Of course, every passenger compartment is gonna have doors that are supposed to open and close so you can get in and out of it. Well, each of these doors is gonna have to have seals that go around it. Why does it have seals? Well, for just the exact thing that you happen to have seen. As moisture comes down onto this, you wanna make sure that you have a nice seal on there. You definitely don't want it making its way inside the passenger compartment. If you find that your seal is just pushed down like this one right here, typically, you can just kind of push it right back up there and generally, it will wanna stay. Other than that, if you happen to find that they're torn or damaged in any way, like this one right here, it really only makes sense to go ahead and replace it.

So those are some of the reasons that I came up with on why you might potentially have water on your floorboard in your passenger compartment. Maybe you could think of other reasons. Okay. So we got the vehicle inside, and we want to try to figure out what's going on that's causing this actual water issue. Obviously, you're gonna wanna diagnose to see exactly what happened. Was somebody trying to get inside here so they can try to help somebody out, maybe damage the seal? Maybe you had your sunroof, so, of course, it's leaking inside there because you didn't clean out those drains right along here. Or maybe even you have these window louvers on your car, they've been on here for a while, and well, like this one right here, it's pretty much just ready to fall off. Any of these things could potentially cause this issue, you wanna diagnose it, you wanna figure out exactly where the water is coming from.

For me personally, if you have a nice garden hose, you can just pull out into your yard a nice, safe area, and go ahead and spray down up along your sunroof if you have one. Spray along the doors and, of course, along the windows and just kind of see if you can figure out where the water is coming from. Now, after you've diagnosed and, of course, tried to fix the problem, the next thing you're probably gonna wanna do is try to get the moisture out of the passenger compartment. Now if there's just a little bit of moisture in here, like maybe it's just a little bit of rain, or a little bit of moisture made its way along the door panel, or maybe even along the floor, but it's not really super wet, you could potentially just open up all the doors and just kind of let the air circulate. And that's, of course, gonna dry things out.

Other than that, maybe you have a fan, you can just go ahead and plug in a fan, have it blow in some air, that's gonna circulate the air a little bit faster. And, of course, that's gonna help evaporate the moisture quicker. Now, of course, if you're handy enough, you could potentially get under the hood and pull out something like this. And then we'll get it set up over here. I think this will work. Let's try. It's a joke. It's a joke. But if, of course, you have a lot of water inside your passenger compartment like this is just sopping wet, that's something that you're gonna have to try to get out of there a little bit differently. Commonly, you could try to use a wet-dry vac. You can come in here and you can just try to suck up as much of that moisture as possible.

Typically, if you go ahead and try to get out that moisture, the majority of it's gonna come out. But, of course, all the padding underneath the carpet itself could potentially still have moisture underneath there. Any of that moisture could potentially cause mold like we talked before. So if you find that you still have a lot of moisture stuck underneath your carpet area here, the next thing that you would wanna do is carefully start disconnecting the battery and then, of course, removing your trim paneling that holds the carpet down. Other than that, more than likely you're gonna have to remove one of your seats if not multiple seats depending on how much water made its way inside the passenger compartment. Something to think about for that though is if you have airbags in your vehicle itself, they could potentially go off when you're disconnecting those or reconnecting them. So that's the reason why you'd wanna make sure you disconnect that negative battery terminal first.

Okay, friends, so that's pretty much what I've got for you for why you might potentially have water inside of your passenger compartment, typically, on the floorboard. Maybe you've had something like this happen to you, maybe you wanna talk about it. Maybe you've got a fix of your own, either way, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you liked the video or you loved the video, go ahead and smash that like button for me. It would mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell, that way that you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Well, now I've got some work to do.