Wet floor!

[oilyrag]

My 2002 Multispace has occasionally had a wet floor on the driver's side and from reading on the Forum, i'm not the only one! After a very dry summer the footwell was bone dry, but here in Ireland we have Biblical rain and over the past few days it hasn't disappointed.
Opened driver's door to find a proper puddle.
How did that get there? Well there was a trace of a dribble over the lower plastic internal trim and the groove between the rubber seal and its attached plastic trim was wet. Cleaned and dried that.
The door seal is unworn and where it should be, and the face on the door itself is clean. The 'stick-on' gutter is a bit wavy and had some muck in it, so that was cleaned - I think it is mainly there to stop drips on the seats when you open the door in the rain, rather than being a proper seal but certainly reduces the amount of water that the main door seal has to deal with.
Heavy rain overnight and there was a new puddle! 
Ran my finger along the length of the lower main seal, squashing it a bit - and a small geyser squirted from one of the holes that allow air out of the seal when the door is closed. The lower part of the main seal was full of water. When it became full up it came out of the vent hole, which is inboard of the door, and straight into the footwell. 
When I opened the door the seal was relaxed, and the level of water in it dropped, so nothing obvious was showing!
Looking round the seal there are a number of air vents - none along the top edge but some on the front windscreen pillar, one of which is right on the outer edge of the seal when the door is closed. It appears that the water was getting in though there, having by-passed the gutter seal, running down the inside of the main seal and filling the bottom tube up. 
Probably changing the gutter seal and main seal would fix the problem, but I decided to take the cheaper option and put a couple of drain holes in the bottom edge of the main seal, one of them close to the vent hole that allowed the water into the car.
I made a hollow 'punch' with a bevelled edge to cut out a small plug from the seal which is made of a foam type of rubber - drilling would probably tear a chunk out. 
Lashing with rain overnight, but now a dry seal and a dribble of water heading outwards from the new drain, rather than in!    

[oilyrag]

The new drain hole.    

[Sol]

That's a great tip. My last van doors used to fill with rain water, very badly. I had to pull off the bottom rubber seal strip mounted to the bottom of the door, and water poured out for ages. Silly, they seem not to have an actual vent to let water out of the door when the seal is fitted on the underside of the door.

[notsofast]

I've definitely had this problem on my M49 van, and have never been able to pinpoint exactly where the water was coming from, so this is a useful finding. Curiously it hasn't happened for a while, so might be influenced by wind direction or whether or not the van is parked up on a kerb (tilting the roof one way or the other).
The outer seal on my drivers side has come away in several places and I've temporarily bodged it with wooden plant sticks wrapped in polythene. I tried to re-stick it using Gorilla glue for outdoors, but that was useless. Then following a suggestion in one of my threads on the forum I tried U-pol Tiger Seal, and that has so far worked great, though it takes a while to cure and, using pressure from the closed door, I kept the wooden stick and polythene in place to keep the rubber in position while the Tiger Seal got a solid grip.
(First image shows bodge fix, second one shows Tiger Seal)

       

[Kieron G]

Glad you managed to get leak sorted, is a real pain in winter with windows constantly steaming up. I had a similar problem with a badly fitted windscreen not bonded properly in an area leaking down inside of the door onto floor