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Mobile home with bad roof (C) Daniel FriedmanManufactured / Mobile Home Leaks & Moisture
Causes, risks, repairs for wet or high moisture in mobile homes

  • POST a QUESTION or COMMENT about the causes & risks of leaks & moisture in manufactured homes, mobile homes, mobile home, caravan, static caravan or trailer or doublewide: leak or high moisture level diagnosis procedures, repair, & maintenance

Leaks or moisture problems in Double-Wides, Mobile Homes, Trailers or Manufactured Housing: what are the causes, inspection procedures, & repairs needed.

Included in this article series are all of the major parts and systems of manufactured or mobile home structures and field inspection procedures as well as common hidden problem and common repair procedures.

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Leaks & Moisture in Manufactured Homes, Doublewides, Caravans & Mobile Homes

Mobile home crawl space (C) Daniel Friedman

Question: How can I track down what's causing high moisture in a doublewide manufactured home?

I have a double wide manufactured home that I'm renovated. It has vinyl siding and perforated soffits common on manufactured homes.

We've noticed moisture high in the walls all around the home and can't identify the cause. Any ideas? Thank you, - T.B. - Colorado

Reply:

A competent onsite inspection by an expert usually finds additional clues that help accurately diagnose a problem with too much moisture in a home. That said, gee, with absolutely no information whatsoever about the home you mention, I'd be just arm-waving to offer a specific diagnosis.

But I can suggest some directions of investigation for tracking down a moisture problem:

Generally the approach is to find the water sources and water or moisture traps. That is, high indoor moisture, enough to put condensation on walls, might be tracked down to one or both of:

Leaky sink and mold in mobile home (C) Daniel Friedman

  1. Common mobile home leaks or moisture sources

    that are wetting the building interior or its ceiling, wall or floor cavities or space below. These could be leaks from outside such as roof leaks, or leaks in the home's plumbing supply or drain piping, detailed

    at MOBILE HOME PLUMBING

    or very common, leaks around mobile home windows or doors

    See MOBILE HOME EXTERIOR DEFECTS

    or high mobile/manufactured home indoor moisture could be from indoor moisture generation by cooking, showers, plants, even plumbing leaks inside. the home

    Watch out: some more-subtle indoor moisture sources can point to urgent life-safety hazards such as improperly-vented gas heaters or water heaters. See details at

    UN-VENTED GAS HEATER SAFETY

    We've also see that because on many manufactured/mobile homes the water heater is installed in a tiny closet accessed only from an outside doorway, a leak at the water heater may continue for so long that the heater itself is dangerous or it may have leaked so much as to have rotted the floor on which it is supported.

    Those details are

    at MOBILE HOME WATER HEATERS
  2. Traps that keep moisture inside the mobile or manufactured home

    because it is not adequately vented.

    Indeed from your note I infer that there is a gabled (peaked/sloped) roof over the home, but we can't be sure that it has working venting or just some perforated soffit panels placed over solid plywood soffits.

    Or you may have soffit intake but no ridge outlet venting.
  3. Crawl spaces as sources of manufactured or mobile home high moisture levels

    for signs of water entry right in the crawl itself; the skirt around the mobile home can keep the area from drying out.

    See MOBILE HOME CRAWL SPACES for more details.

If I'm right that you're in Colorado, you're not in such a high humidity area as the Southeastern U.S. That in turn makes me wonder if there is not either water below the home or leaks in or into it from roof, windows or doors (notorious leakers on older manufactured homes).

If the moisture is uniform around all of the interior of the home I suspect it could be coming from a source that would equally wet the whole structure - below the entire structure up through floors, or leaks across a wide area of roof. Observing moisture high on walls may just indicate where the cool walls are in contact with warmer, high-moisture-content air inside the home. (Warm moist air rises).

If your renovation permits, you might need to make some test cuts to be sure you know where water is and is not, and to be sure you're not renovating by putting a new skin over a rotting or inset infested structure.

Sorry I can't be smarter but that's about as much arm-waving as I can dare with no more information. If you'd like to send some photos or further description of what's there and what you're seeing, that may permit some further suggestions.

See

See also the advice at

Follow-Up: wet walls traced to frost or ice in the home eaves and attic

Photograph of frost in an attic - evidence of a source of attic mold and moisture damage

Thanks for the reply. I managed to find a manufactured home installer who immediately knew what I was talking about.  It turns out all this is a universal problem with manufactured homes (and some stick built homes) in cold, high wind areas. 

The soffits are vented continuously.  Snow actually drifts inside the soffit then, when the weather warms, melts and some water runs down the walls.  As this can happen many days after the initial precipitation it’s often mistaken for a condensation issue.

The installer didn't have any suggestions for a solution.  In fact, he said if I came up with anything to let him know.  Any ideas?

Reply:

We have seen several points of frost or even ice accumulation at house eaves and even deeper into the attic in uninsulated HVAC ductwork.

Clues that point to the attic ice or frost accumulation as the source of indoor leaks and moisture

I think a diagnostic clue that can help track down apparent building leaks or moisture on walls that originates in the attic may be the observation of leaks in a warming weather trend after a long cold spell. 

Also the moisture shows up only on the exterior walls, not on building interior walls. It doesn't have to be snow blowing into the soffits - which is unusual; anything that allows moisture condense, collect, and freeze in the attic or in attic HVAC ducts can produce such leaks when things thaw out.

The cause your installer cited, snow drifts in the soffits, is possible but more common are some of these other problems that can produce the same symptoms:

How do we fix these problems of ice and frost formation in the attic ... it depends. First let's accurately diagnose the cause by a careful inspection in the attic. Wind-wash will be obvious - insulation will have been disturbed. Ice dam leaks leave characteristic stains that we illustrate in that article.

Details about these attic frost, ice, or moisture problems that show up as "leaks or moisture on building walls" and how they are fixed are in the articles cited above.

At INSPECT ATTICS for MOISTURE or MOLD we discuss inspecting (and correcting) building attics for evidence of condensation, moisture, or even ice.

 



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