Do you do a free car leak inspection?
Quick answer: No. We don't offer free leak inspections. We can take a brief look to confirm whether a car is leaking, but proving where the water is getting in is a paid 28-point diagnostic. It starts with decontamination (mould is a health risk) and moves through proof-testing with sonic sensors, coloured dye, smoke, micro-cameras and moisture meters. Jobs with past modifications or repairs behind them often run to several hours.
Confirming a car is leaking takes minutes. Proving where the water is getting in takes hours, and in some cases the car has to be partly stripped to reach the point of ingress. That is why the full inspection is a paid job.
The quick look versus the real inspection
If you drop in and want to know whether your car is leaking at all, we can usually tell you. Damp carpets, a musty smell, fogged glass, rust blooms in the footwells -- these are obvious once you know where to look.
That is not the same as finding the source. A single wet footwell can be fed from the scuttle, the sunroof drains, a door membrane, a windscreen seal, or a combination of all four. Narrowing that down is what you are paying for.
Decontamination comes first
Before anyone opens the car up, we treat the interior with antifungal and antimicrobial products. Persistent damp breeds mould, and black mould in particular is a genuine health hazard for our staff and for you. Pulling carpets and trim on a car that has been quietly going mouldy for months is not something we do without that first step.
Gary talks us through the five most common entry points -- wet carpets, steamed windows and a musty smell usually point to one of these five causes before the car even goes up on the ramp.
The 28-point check
Once the car is safe to work on, we run a structured check covering the places cars routinely leak, plus the points your specific make and model is known for. Common Mercedes failures are not the same as common BMW or Land Rover failures, and model-specific knowledge saves hours.
After the visual check we prove the source using the equipment the job needs:
- Ultrasonic sensors to listen for air passing through a seal under pressure
- Coloured dyes and inks flushed through drain runs so we can see where water emerges
- Smoke introduced into cavities to reveal escape paths
- Micro-cameras pushed into box sections and behind trim
- Moisture meters reading through carpet and underlay to map the wet area
No single tool proves every leak. We pick the combination that fits the symptom and the car.
Why it takes hours, not minutes
Straightforward cases -- a blocked scuttle drain, a failed pollen filter gasket -- can be proved quickly. The work expands on cars that have had aftermarket modifications, body repairs or a previous windscreen replacement: each of those adds new possible ingress points the factory never designed in. Tracking the water back to its true source on that kind of car routinely takes most of a day.
That is the honest reason we charge for inspection. We would rather quote a realistic price for a job we can finish properly than promise a free ten-minute answer that turns into an unpaid afternoon.