If your floor or carpeting gets wet near your sliding patio door every time it rains, there is a little maintenance procedure that might help.
Your sliding patio door actually "rolls" on a raised center track. On either side of the track there are usually "walls" at least an inch high. An inside wall and an outside wall. The outside wall should have "weep holes"... little slits at the bottom of the wall several feet apart. These weep holes are to drain the water in the track when the rain cascades down the glass.
These weep holes often get clogged with dirt and leaves requiring periodic cleaning. Sometimes, an over-zealous contractor may have accidentally "caulked" closed these holes during an effort to tuck point or provide external weather sealing.
Get a pipe cleaner, coat hanger, popsicle stick or just about anything else that will fit through the weep holes and clean them out.
Once clean, you should be able to pour a small pitcher of water into the track and watch it migrate to the weep holes and trickle outside.
Older tracks without weep holes may need to have some drilled. They do not need to be larger than half the diameter of a pencil.
9 comments:
Great post. It was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for sharing!! Great information.
would a cauled over set of weep holes cause extreme flooding of the interior surface-
had a hard rain and patio door balcony flooded-weep holes blocked -now major carpeting loss
jerry
My weep holes apparently "weep" both to the outside and inside of my home. Thoughts or suggestions?
Never-mind, found the issue. Weep holes are leaking straight onto the pressure treated frame. No tar tape, caulking or flashing. Lived here 9 years never noticed till I pulled the carpet up when installing my laminate flooring. Carpet was acting like a sponge. Filled weep holes with cauling till spring. Going to put in new french doors then.
Common cause of blocked weep holes (or slots)is dirt or over-zealous caulking. Sometimes pipe cleaners can work to clean them out.
Thanks for your post which is truly informative for us and we will surely keep visiting this website.
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I guess I'm one of the unlucky ones...After looking and poking around for weep holes, discovered that my "older style" sliding glass doors did not even have them to let water drain from the inter tracks. After loosing my porch roof where rolled roofing was used on a 1:12 pitch, this became a major problem when rain water ran over and under the track onto my interior cement slab, destroying my newly installed laminate flooring! Finally figured out where to drill the needed weep holes to provide needed drainage until I replace the doors and install a new EPDM rubber roof. Thank you for your article explaining that some "older style" doors may not have weep holes even though until reading this, spent several hours looking for them.
This is an amazing blog post should be appreciated for providing information about sliding windows and doors, here I installed Vacuum Insulated Glass in my home windows which is looking fantastic.
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