Removing water from inside the car

Having just had the windshield and the seal replaced last week by Shayne Green, I wanted to start with as "fresh" of a car as possible.

Years of a leaky windshield has lead to water making it's way into the car. Usually, when it would rain, the inside of the car would get wet. If you were driving along, you would start feeling drips on your feet!

Well as you can imagine this would cause the car to fog up quite quickly on colder days. Armed with only a 2 speed heater fan (this car has no rear window defogger), it became quite difficult to drive when it would be cold. The front window would stay mostly clear once the car had warmed up. Forget about the rear window, there was nothing I could do to keep it fog-less.

I never bothered trying to suck the water out of the car since I knew it would just end up back in the car next time it rained. Now with a new windshield, I won't have that problem anymore! I decided that this was the time to remove the water inside the car.

There are many suggested ways of doing this. They range from simple (such as vacuuming up any water that might be in the carpets) to extreme (pulling the entire interior of the car out). I settled somewhere in between.

With the aid of a dehumidifier that usually takes space in my parent's basement, I was able to get almost all the water out of the car!



Here's the car in the backyard with the dehumidifier sitting in the front drivers seat.

I let the car sit that way for a couple of days while my distributor was being rebuilt, emptying the water basket every day when I would wake up. I didn't measure how much water I dumped out, but I'd guess it was probably about a quarter of a quart. Granted that's not a ton of water, but it's a lot considering this much water was pulled out of the air inside my car.

Here's a picture of the window about 5 minutes after I turned the dehumidifier on.



By the time I pulled that machine out of the car it was totally dry inside! So dry in fact, that the windows haven't held any condensation at all since! I went outside last night at about 2am or so (after the car had been sitting for an extended period of time) and all the windows were completely clear.


Today I got my first test of the windshield seal. It was raining quite hard in Portland, and I took the car for a spin. On the road for over an hour in some pretty nasty rain, and not a single drip inside the car!

I've still got a bit of an ignition issue to sort out, but right now I'm quite pleased with the progress I've made on this car thus far!