Not fun!

So as I said the rain started, and what we didn't know was that it was going to get much, much worse to the point of pouring, and being rocked by 40 mph gusts, and the really great part was it lasted for 3 days!  So okay, we can hunker down with the best of them, and sometimes it's nice just to kick back, watch a movie, have some popcorn, and chill.  So on the second continuous day of it we decided to do just that.  I'm getting the DVD set up, Jan's making popcorn, and wait a minute, what did I just hear?  Is that dripping water?  Oh crap, there is water coming in around our front AC from the ceiling.  Oh man!  

We have to deal with it as it is really leaking and the rain is not letting up anytime soon.  So Jan dives out to get some tools, as we have to drop the hinged ceiling in the front of the coach to get to the AC.  Now I should explain something, at this point we are figuring we just have a small leak between the roof and the AC, and all we'll have to do is tighten it just a bit and we'll be good to go.  The AC units on RV's sit on the roof above a 14" x 14" hole on foam gaskets, and they are sandwiched with 4 long bolts that squeeze them down to the roof on the gasket.  We had experienced a small leak at this front AC before and tightening the bolts did the trick.  Every so often as part of normal maintenance you need to compress the gasket a little bit as it ages, maybe once every year or so is normal.  This is a fairly new AC unit that we installed so maybe we didn't compress it enough to begin with, anyway these are the things we are thinking.

So we drop the ceiling and man, do we have a leak!  The panel has held quite a bit of water before we knew about it.  So we have towels and pots out to catch the water.  I tighten the bolts a bit, and we try to dry it out enough to see if we've stopped the leak, no, it's still leaking.  So I tighten a bit more, looks like we got it now.  Good.  So we dry things up a bit more, get the popcorn, start the movie, and oh no, there comes the water again!  We have to get it stopped.  It can't be the AC, it has to be something else, but what?  So now my hero Jan goes up on the roof in the wind and rain, half afraid she's going to blow off the roof, but there is no sign of anything wrong, so back down she comes.  It must be the AC, remember the KISS principle, Keep It Simple Stupid, so I tighten the AC some more, and in comes some more water.  Now we start tearing out insulation and ducting to try to see where the water is coming from, and finally we find it.  It is coming in where our coax cable comes through the roof from our antennas, so now we at least know where the leak is, now what?  We don't have any sealant that will work in the wet(we will in the future though), so now we both suit up and up I go onto the roof and see what I can figure out.  Jan stands by below to get the tools and equipment we might need.

The coax goes into a hole in the roof, which is then caulked and covered with a plastic fitting designed for the application.  It looks good, but obviously not.  Now you have to picture this, it is pouring, it is blowing, and it's cold, maybe 50, this is not pleasant!  I get this idea that maybe we can dry the fitting as well as possible, hide under a tarp to try to keep it a little dry, inundate the fitting with caulk, cover it with aluminum foil, tape it down, and then cover it with the tarp, picture all that in the screaming wind.  But that is what we do, we get soaked, frustrated, cold, but we stop the leak!

So now we are in Seward, and yesterday we had a period of no rain long enough that we went back up, removed the entire tube's worth of caulk that I had gooked onto the fitting, removed the fitting, cleaned it all up, caulked it very well, and put it all back together again, and sure enough an hour later it started to rain again.  But we think we are good now.  Great fun, huh?