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Dear Car Talk: My 2000 Ford Explorer Sport’s sunroof is leaking. I took it to our local mechanic, and he tried to fix it and ended up sealing it shut.
It still leaks. I get a shower every time it rains! Help! What else can I do to stop the leaking?
I live in rural Alaska. There are only one or two mechanics here, and I can’t drive to another one because I live off the road system! — Abigail “Drenched in Alaska”
Did they seal it with oatmeal, Abigail? Here’s a trade secret for you: All sunroofs leak. It’s pretty much impossible to cut an opening in the roof of the car and keep all water out.
So, cars with sunroofs have drains built into the sunroof housing. There are small drain holes in the sunroof opening that allow any water that gets in there to flow through tubes routed through the windshield pillars and then spill out on the ground. I don’t know if they checked your drains before sealing up the roof, but that may have been the problem.
Sealing the sunroof shut also works, as long as it’s sealed completely. If we were working on a car like yours, and we had already confirmed that the drains were clear, we would then test the sunroof theory with duct tape.
Duct tape has the advantage of being wide. Whereas if they sealed it with a bead of silicone adhesive, that’s a thin bead that might not fully seal the gaps.
So you can simply add duct tape to whatever your mechanic did. I trust you’re way past worrying about aesthetics at this point, Abigail. My doctor often says the same thing to me.
However, before you duct tape up the sunroof, as an experiment, I would duct tape around the windshield. Water is just as likely to be getting into the roof cavity via a bad top windshield seal as it is a sunroof leak. So put the tape across the top of the windshield and down both sides. Just don’t cover the whole windshield, please.
One of those two things — sealing the windshield or re-sealing the sunroof — is going to fix this, Abigail. Then you can stop driving around Alaska in your wetsuit.
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