Had I known what the day was going to bring I may have stayed in bed, but I guess thats not how things work. This morning it was raining, a really wild storm with heavy driving rain, which was (as it turned out) the perfect weather to expose a leak in our trucks roof-top air conditioning system. Only a few miles down the road we noticed a wet patch on the ceiling of the truck's head liner. As we drove the wet patch expanded until almost the entire drivers side ceiling was wet. A few miles later and it was now raining inside the truck. Fortunately we found a convenient truck parking area and stopped. However the rain did not stop and neither did the the water leaking into the truck. Eventually I got out a tarp and covered the roof of the truck. That eventually worked but by then the entire head liner was soaked and we had containers catching water all over the inside of the truck cab.
Now we were starting to think we would have to wait in this truck stop all day, but as luck would have it within an hour the rain stopped and the sun emerged and after some mopping up we were under way.
Almost miraculously the dry weather, some air flow from open windows, and within a few hours the head liner was completely dry.
Now unfortunately that is not the end of the water stories. Some weeks back I reported on a water leak under the kitchen sink. At the time I reported that water was coming from the filter system and hence I disconnected the filter. Well there is still, from time to time, water appearing on the floor near and under the kitchen sink.
This morning we found water leaking from the sink drain, the leak had actually filled a bowl in one of our storage drawers. The fix for that was to simply tighten the connection. But even so, there was still water appearing on the floor underneath the sink cabinet.
Nina pointed out that we have been seeing water on the floor next to and/or underneath the kitchen cabinet since Nov last year just after we entered Turkey, that is for about 8 months and we still have not found the source of the water, despite fixing a number of possible leaks along the way. So as we sat scratching our heads this morning we came up with the idea of using paper toweling to track the source of the leak.
So throughout the remainder of the day we repeatedly laid sheets of toweling in strategic places under the sink (even wrapping pipes and fittings with toweling) and then would drive for an hour, stop and inspect the toweling.
In this manner we slowly eliminated, various pipes and fittings, the drain system, the main storage tank as sources of the water and narrowed the candidate (culprit?) down to the hot water storage tank. Which is ironic since that is what we suspected back in December last year in Turkey. It is also worth noting how thankful we were today for the modification made to the large storage drawer under the sink while the truck was in Springfield earlier in the year. Each round of todays experiments required the emptying, removal and reinstallation of that drawer, an exercise we must have repeated a dozen times today.
We still have a few more experiments to do, but as of now we think that the hot water tank leaks but only when the truck engine is running and coolant from the engine is heating the water in the tank and increasing the pressure inside the tank. On the strength of this analysis we are going to buy a replacement tank and install it.
Eventually we got to the southern side of Stockholm and Bredang Camping, a large and well packed camping ground within easy metro reach of Stockholm central.
We don't presently have any remedy for the leak related to the truck air conditioner. During our stay in Stockholm I will investigate that problem a little further. But if, as I suspect, I see no solution given the facilities I have available our plan is simple. We will not drive in heavy rain, but rather cover the truck with a plastic sheet and wait for better weather. Not a strategy that would work well in Gig Harbor, WA.