Today is the first day it snowed. My windshield was frozen and and I used the heat to warm up the car, also the defroster.
Turns out it’s leaking under my dash (water not coolant) when I came to a stop after 15 minutes of driving.
You can see the small puddle of water in the picture and I also put my hand on the blower motor and it feels wet .
What’s the issue? Sunroof drain? Windshield have a bad seal? Is it just a backed up ac drain? If it was the heater core, wouldn’t it be coolant?
So many scenarios and I don’t know what it is. Should I check my cabin filter next time to see if it’s wet? If it is, what does that mean? It didn’t appear to leak any more on my way back from driving, so maybe I’ll have to see what happens when it snows again 2004 Kia amanti…
When you turned on your defroster, it also turned on the AC compressor to dry the air going to your windshield. The air goes from the intake to the ducts, there are two of them, one under the cowl for outside air and one under your dash.
Then it goes through the AC evaporator, aka cooling coil, to be cooled down and extract moisture, then through the heater core to be heated up and finally to the windshield vents as a warm air with very low relative humidity to deice and dry the inside of the windshield.
The moisture from the evaporator collects in the pan under the evaporator and out a drain. If the drin gets clogged by mold, debris or ice, the water will spill into the blower motor compatment and out the intake vent onto the carpet.
Yeah but its not a plug, it’s a rubber tube that goes from the back of the drain pan, through the firewall and then points down to the ground. Open your hood, go to the passenger side and look down the fire wall to where it transitions from vertical to a slant backwards toward the rear. Along this transition, maybe an inch or two above or below, you will see a black rubber hose, 3-4" long pointing down. That is the drain. The usual fix is to blow compressed air up the tube.
It could be but typically they get the whole floor wet. When it is the front passenger floor only, it is almost always the AC drain. It’s kinda like “figure the odds”.
I will try this tomorrow I just hope the drain line isn’t hard to locate. I heard zipties work good I’ll try. Does anyone know specifically where the drain is? Is it directly under passenger?
Before you start doing all this, it is possible that your clog could be due to ice in one or more of the drains. This can happen when it rains a little while the air is below freezing or the vehicle is slightly above freezing as snow collects, it melts and then refreezes into ice as it goes through the drains.
If you haven’t had this issue before this storm, then consider this.
@keith but then again also, I haven’t turned my defroster or heat all the way up this summer like I did yesterday… but shouldn’t rain not be in the drains anyway?
Rain should not get into the AC drain, it can get into the windshield drains and sunroof drains. If you were driving in the snow, you could have splashed slush up against the AC drain hose where it could freeze and block it.
