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Basic Car Maintenance: How to repair a leaking sunroof

  Friday, 24 April 2015

If ever there was a maintenance problem to rain on your parade (so to speak) it’s a leaking sunroof.

There’s nothing worse than being stuck in the car in the midst of winter with freezing rain dripping onto your head!  Fortunately, a leaky sunroof is usually a fairly easy problem to fix.

Most of the time a leaky sunroof is simply a matter of a clogged up drain tube.  The result is that the water overflows inside the vehicle.  This is usually no more than a 20-minute repair.

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Here’s our step-by-step guide to carrying out the repair yourself:

1. Open up your sunroof and locate your drain holes: they’ll usually be found in both front corners.  (The tubes run through the door pillars and then drain through).
2. DON’T start poking through the tubing using coat hangers or blast them with compressed air: doing so risks piercing the tubing, which could result in the whole tube having to be replaced.  Also, don’t disconnect it from the drain hole.
3. The best way to remove any debris is with a traditional vacuum cleaner and a trap adapter: these can be fitted to the end of the metal part of the neck of the vacuum cleaner to send all the air through a smaller piece of tubing.
4. Simply attach the adapter end of the tube to the drain hole and then turn on the vacuum cleaner: any debris should be sucked through. 

If the sunroof still doesn’t clear, then it’s probably a good idea to take the car to a specialist: at this level, you’re actually talking about bending and moving the metal to get a better fit, and that’s not really a DIY friendly task.

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