Roof Leaks In Your Skoolie? Chances Are It’s Your Emergency Hatch.
If you spend much time in skoolie owner groups and forums, you’ll start to notice some patterns.
People asking what to do for work when you live on the road, trying to figure out how to install their solar panels, comparing different kinds of toilets, and bemoaning their leaky emergency roof hatches.
If you’re building out your skoolie yourself, you’ll (hopefully) be able to identify and fix any leaks early on in the process. But, if you’re like me and decide to buy an already built-out bus, roof leaks can be a bit more complicated to track down.
The low-hanging fruit in the search for the source of your leaks is to grab a tube of sealant and your best caulk gun and hop up on your roof to make sure the metal seams and rivets are sealed. There are lots of resources on YouTube about how to seal your roof, so I’m not going to get into that here, but it’s definitely an important step.
If you get everything sealed up but are still getting leaks, it’s probably your emergency exit roof hatch. They’re notoriously leaky. I didn’t want to believe it at first, when I had narrowed the source of my leaks down to just a couple of options.
Having that rooftop access from inside is so nice.
Just pop the hatch up when you want a little bit of a cross-breeze.
What if you actually need an emergency exit in the roof someday?
The day I discovered just how wrecked my emergency hatch actually was, I thought I was up on the roof to just remove the old sealant around it and then add on some fresh new sealant. I was sure that would fix it.
I started scraping (and scraping, and scraping) and eventually got through 30 years of layered-on sealants down to the plastic of the hatch itself.
Around nearly every screw that originally attached the hatch to the roof, the plastic was cracked so badly that the screw was just in its own little island of plastic and not actually holding the hatch at all.
After several hours of scraping, and thinking I was rounding the corner on this remove/replace job, I wasn’t quite emotionally ready for the beginning of an unexpected project. To be entirely honest, I just got down off the roof, went inside, and tried not to think about it until the next day.
Spring in Virginia tends to be pretty wet, and so I knew that whatever I decided to do, whether replacing the hatch with a new one or something else, would all need to be done in one day if at all possible. Having a big open hole in the roof for days just wasn’t going to fly.
I ended up deciding to install a Lexan (polycarbonate) skylight. Some will say this isn’t the best solution, and there definitely are more functional, prettier skylight options out there. But a Lexan skylight ended up being the right combination of relatively cheap and pretty simple to do. If you want to see the materials I used and what my process looked like, take a peek at this reddit post.
So, if you’re stuck in the frustrating phase of trying to track down the source of your roof leaks, I encourage you to take the time to scrape off the sealant on your emergency hatch(es) and check on the state of the hatch itself. Chances are, unless your bus is very new, it has taken a beating and probably needs to be repaired or replaced.
