basically, i have been experiencing a very foul smell almost every time i get into the car and more recently, all the way down the road. I FINALLY found the source today, kindof. I was in my trunk, where I stash a lot of crap that won't fit in my 3 in-cabin storage spaces (pass seat, left half of bench, right half of bench), including my textbooks. I had to drop my classes for financial reasons until january, so my textbooks have been sitting there for the last couple weeks... I picked one up and the back 20% of the pages were SOAKING WET. So are some spots of the trunk carpeting and fiberglass floor. I have also had issues with difficult-to-eliminate fogging on the rear window, and larger than normal droplets forming on the windwhields if I have the car off, and condensation behind the highmount brakelight.

so i aks you. Is i bling?.....
er, right [James May is cool though]

so i ask you, aside from the 400mL/hr dehumidifier I have, what else should I do to rid my car of the dampness and even worse, potential fungus/bacteria?

 

bleach, finding the leak and fixing it, hairdryer.

 

how to apply this bleach? with a spray bottle or.. also will that damage the paint because i have a potential bacteria colony at the place where the back window meets the trunklid, in the center

 

pull ALL of the carpet out of the trunk. clean it with an antibacterial agent (hell, laundry detergent works well enough... go over with a light dousing in bleach too....)

remove the nasty felt carpet pad stuff. it's ruined at this point anyway.

now clean the inside of the trunk surfaces with a good strong cleaner to kill any more mold/mildew.

once it's clean, crawl inside the trunk with a flashlight and shut the lid. have someone (preferably that you trust!!!) hose down the car from the outside. find where the water is coming in.
when you find it, fix the leak.

very likely it's going to be the weatherstripping along the top lip of the trunk. that's where it most commonly leaks if you haven't gotten in a wreck and smashed in the tail lights.

 

speaking of taillights, I swapped them but didn't reseal with new RTV. plus the stupid darn rubber cap things are not pushed into position at the rear sidemarker portion of the taillight.

and honestly, I think the taillight swap and smell happened around the same thing but i can't be sure.

 

OMFG!

http://s164.photobucket.com/albums/u...ter%20problem/

 

Well,that explains the smell

 

you should have seen the caddy or the sentra.
that's why both went bye bye.

 

Think water could be getting in from a rusted hole where the seatbelt is anchored on the drivers side?

 

God, I hope you don't have this problem (I do). If this is the case, don't have anyone sit in the back driver's side seat because that seatbelt is now just for show...
To see if you have this problem pull the carpet off of the driver's side rear wheel well from the trunk and check for holes/rust.

 

If you didn't reseal around the tail lights and push the caps back in, then I GUARANTEE that's where your water is coming from. 1000% guarantee.
pull them out and reseal them with the proper sealant (it's not RTV) and put the caps back in.

think about it a minute... when it rains outside and the water runs down your rear window and into the "gutter" around the trunklid, where does it go after that? Yup.. it runs right down the back onto the tail lights... your tail lights that aren't sealed....

A few years ago my wife's Alty got rear ended and needed a new tail light. the stealership I took it to didn't reseal it properly, and I had 5x that much water in the trunk in a matter of weeks. I pulled the light out, and the leak was simply a 1/16" wide layer of dirt on top of the black goo... pulled it off, cleaned the old goo off and resealed it. done.

 

yeeeeeeeeeeah. you can say that again. I was beginning to have respiratory trouble because of it.

aanyhow. I flooded that compartment with fresh water, let it drain thru the hole that i removed the rubber plug from, then while it was till fairly full i dumped a buttload of bleach in there. and rinsed it around and around and around and down. also bleached the other notably wet areas where the shelf/carpet were over the spare. I sprayed ammonia on my toolbox and laptop bag.

Now i let that mixture drain out of the trunk as much as it would, then i plugged the hole again, and let the dehumidifier get back to work. It's a slow process but it is condensing the water out of the car and should be odorless by morning. Hopefully.

Oh and maximahappy22, my wireless lappymoose still works.

WTB trunk fiberboard piece, trunk carpeting...

 

so if it's not black RTV then what sort of stuff is it? I had black RTV on my weather sheet in my door panel... is that wrong too?




but it all makes sense now. I put in the new tails, and it started stinking. Eventually i pushed the caps in and it stopped. then just last week i was messing around with it and i pulled the rubber caps out again (trying to see if a green bulb inside of the red sidemarker would make it orange, as a theory i'm testing... it did btw make it more orange than red) and i didn't put them back in... and lo and behold the damn thing started stinking again. It rained intensely from thursday to saturday (thank god, our water supply was gonna run out in 2 and a half months at that point), and boom, whaddya know. honestly though, the taillights were my hunch since i knew they weren't sealed, and i knew the trunk was the worst area.

 

That will surely slow down your 1/4 mile times

Sorry couldn't resist. That sucks. Glad you found the problem though.

 

http://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalo...dowsealant.php

That's what you need to use to seal the lights..

you can use RTV if you want, but you'll have a REAAAAAL hard time getting the lights out again. i.e. they're coming apart in pieces.

 

http://www.partsamerica.com/ProductD...egoryCode=2131 will that work? or any other Permatex product? They ought to make a non-hardening compound.

it was a pain removing my dual duct after the spacers were installed. Like, a huge pain. Like, breaker-bar-accidentally-breaking-something-underneath-it-to-get-the-damned-thing-off pain. So i know what you mean about regular RTV.

 

no.. that's still RTV.. the flowable stuff just means it's thinner than regular RTV before it cures. We use it at work to repair urethane transducer faces that need to be perfectly smooth and flat. cut out the damaged urethane, then drip this stuff in there and let it flatten out and cure.

its consistency is more like honey than regular RTV..

so that's not it. look in the window repair/replacement stuff near the window weld and bodywork supplies if you'r elooking locally.

 

hokay.

smell was far more subuded today. After 7 hours at work the smell was almost negligible when i got in.

 

How's your power antenna? I know mine is a bit loose and water goes in through there if sprayed directly. My antenna is bigger than yours

So...how's it smellin now?

 

My antenna has a drain tube coming out.

Dude looks like you were making yogurt in your trunk!

 

my power antenna has a functional motor but a broken mast. So I'm going to be fixing that in a few months, but it's still present, and thus, not adding to my water troubles.

the smell is way better. It's basically gone now. I relocated my massive dehumidifier to my trunk now that the absent spare/trunk floorboard are out of the way and there's more vertical clearance in there. No bleach smell either. Just good old... nothing. I'm hoping the extra little pouch of moisture absorber that i hung from my trunklid springs is gonna help keep the situation under control until i get the time to reseal my tails.

Thanks to Brian/Matt.. that bleach did wonders.