Until now I have experienced two kinds of water leakage in my Rover 75. One of them is (supposedly) causing a failure of the fuel pump power output, so 99% of the times the fuel pumps (both under bonnet and in tank) receive no power and the car isn’t able to start; this leakage is due to the water piling up in a small “pool” right above the BCU and the internal fusebox, where a rubber drain is supposed to prevent this occurence, but fails to do that if you live someplace where leaves and seeds from the trees fall on your car.
The area under the bonnet, the "pool" is right beneath the hood hinge.This area looks terribly dirty, but it's already been cleaned, so go figure what was inside there before. Needless to say it was filled by water, which fell inside the car, falling onto the fusebox area and wetting the passenger carpet.My father says the meaning of this is to prevent dirt pieces from falling under... I say instead it's just stupid engineering. The very first solid thing that falls in there is bound to clog the drain... in my case, a whole load of pinetree seeds filled the drain up to the top.Problem solved, I cut off the tip making the exit wide open.
The other drain, I discovered by pure chance. As I said, I investigated the first drain after the pumps failed to start, so I thought the pumps actually failed; I went and checked the in-tank pump, by pulling out the back seat; behold the surprise, there was another quite big pool of water in the recessed space close to the in-tank pump housing cover. I was able to trace the water stains up to the trunk, close to the rear lights; it was difficult to find the cause because everything was mostly dry, but I noticed a slight running water stain.
Water was stagnating in the corner of the wheel area, and caused a major wetting of everything close to that area.The vertical stain running on the metal gave away the water leakage.The red arrow points to the part were the silver decoration has a screw running into a hole, and that's where the water came in.This is your culprit, the round gasket pressing against the metal lost its ability to isolate the inside from the outside.I putted back everything together, and tested the gasket, even if I was already sure it was faulty. So I showered the area where I suspected the leakage to be (notice the nice courtesy rainbow)There you have it, a fresh water stream coming from the faulty gasket.Small pool formed in the trunk after the test (I had just dried the old pool, which was way larger than this). As soon as you brake, or are driving down a slope, the water streams donwards toward the backseat area, where it forms a secondary pool like the one I found.
I generously added silicone to the gasket area, both from outside and inside, and put everything back together, should be pretty much isolated by now. For the sake of it, I did the same treatment for all the accessible gaskets of the silver lining (there are two on both sides).
My no-power-to-fuel-pumps problem is not yet solved though, this car likes to play games, and when I see the pumps are working again, soon after, at the next engine start, they aren’t anymore. At this point, I suspect a faulty wire.
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