Water Leak Front Passenger Side?

[StevePT]

Well I was working on the GP this weekend replacing the broken/loose plastic door panel fasteners that were causing my door panels to squeak and also adding in some insulation material while I was at it.

I decided to pull back the carpet on the passenger side and take a look under it and see how good the insulation was and if it could be improved. It's actually a fair amount of molded foam adhered to the back side of the carpet. Anyway, when I pulled back the carpet the foam was wet and the floor pan was wet. It looked like condensation and there weren't pools of water, but I'm assuming that's because the foam had absorbed much of the water.

I tried to pinpoint the leak and I pulled back the rubber/foam insulation that runs up the firewall. I could feel it was wet in the middle but as I contorted my arm and tried to reach up further I couldn't find any other wet spots. What I see is there's the plate and rubber seal that the HVAC wire harness routes through, but I don't see how that could let that much water through and nothing about it looked "bad."

The only other thing I can think of is water is getting through where the blower housing intake seals against the cowl. It looks like the housing is screwed onto the cowl from the inside of the cabin and there's a dense foam seal around the periphery. There were no leaves or dirt buildup that could have been holding water back from draining out of the cowl.

I didn't have the time to get those screws loose and see if that seal was the problem, so I put it all back together. I'm thinking next Friday I'll start digging into it and have the weekend to work on it.

I didn't think about it until now, but this might explain why my passenger side window fogs up more and doesn't defrost nearly as fast as the driver's side.

Anyone else come across this?

[StevePT]

Well, I thought maybe I had a unique problem here and this would take some time to figure out but I just did a search (should have done that before hand) and it looks like this is a common problem. However, I was never getting water dripping on top of the carpet. Had I have never pulled back the carpet I would never have known it was wet under there.

I'll look into this tonight and report back... Sorry for jumping the gun and posting when I didn't need to.

[richtazz]

no prob Steve, you're forgiven,

[maceman05]

I had the same problem on my 99 GT. I took my car down to the local auto body shop. He said that my car wasn't the only car he has seen. Water was running down on the passenger side windshield and running over the plastic cowling, then which drips onto the floor. He simply covered it with plastic and I haven't had a problem with it since. Its been about 3 years now and still dry carpet.