Bessecar E410 Dampness

[mrsc]

Hi, any help appreciated. Our 2005 Bessie had a hab Check recently, and the damp meter registered over 50% in parts of the ceiling and floor. It is not noticeable in the van, it appears to be all behind the scenes so to speak.

How do you tackle this? Do we just run it for as long as we can, or get shot at a loss.

The engine by the way is sweet. A good runner.

[hallii]

Get whoever did the check to give a more accurate description of where it is coming in. It is usually the seams or maybe a window or roof light.

 

Then either get it fixed or fix it yourself. If you try and PX as it is the dealer will find the damp and knock your PX value right down. So it has to be fixed. Don't ignore it, what may be a small problem now will become a major one in time. If you like the van it has to be worth it.

 

H

[Fred Duck]

We've had a small damp problem to the floor on our similar but 2004 E410. Only noticed from underneath but in our case, to the extreme, rear, near side corner (ie under the fridge). After much thought and investigation, it looks like a failure of external trim at that corner. The rear plastic corner trim to either side (that hold the rear light units) are sealed to the van body externally with a flexible plastic trim that runs across the rear of the van. With age and the effects of uv this has shrunk in length such that it doesn't seal any more at the two extreme corners. In our case, when at home, the van sits such that water draining off the roof runs down the rear near side and flows into the resulting gap where it meets the end grain of the plywood floor and saturates it.

 

Carefully sealing this gap with Sikoflex Caravan sealer looks to have solved the problem with the plywood slowly drying out and, even with the rains this last week the drying process looks to have continued when I looked this afternoon to the point that it's now dry. To be on the safe side, I've removed both of the corner trims and sealed their junction with the van sides and also the adjacent bottom of the awning rails at the rear corners where the plastic rail filler has also shrunk back.

 

If your damp test has been carried out recently, it also might be that it's picking up, at least in part, air born damp on the internal surfaces resulting from the van sitting out through the very wet winter. Perhaps give it a thorough airing, get some heat on even, and see if the readings reduce.

 

FD