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We're baffled by this. Can someone help us solve this mystery?

In our mobile home, we recently (as in within the past few days) discovered some moisture behind the baseboard in the middle of an interior wall. The moisture is only in the middle of the wall in the area behind the baseboard. Behind that wall is the stove (you can see the vent and stove outlet), and the fridge is further to the left. In fact, the moisture seems to be from underneath the floor joist of that section.

  • We checked the roof: no leaks. And it doesn't seem there's any moisture present on the ceiling or the joists leading down to that area.

  • We checked behind the stove, and it isn't wet. We checked behind the fridge, and we don't see any wetness either.

  • We checked the corner where the interior and exterior wall meet. We thought maybe there was a leak in the siding, but there's no moisture present on that side.

  • We thought maybe condensation was coming from the vent and dripping to that area. But the wood underneath the vent is bone dry.

The moisture only seems to be coming from that area somehow.

You can see from the pictures of the baseboard that the moisture comes from the middle and then goes outward.

There is no basement underneath this section of the mobile home. This area only has the crawl space under it.

We will have someone coming to look at this. But when we explained this issue to them and sent them pictures, they were also baffled.

Does anyone know how we could potentially resolve this moisture issue? Has anyone experienced anything like this?

VeryConfusedHomeowners
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1 Answers1

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We had a couple contractors come to take a look. I'm leaving the answer here in case anyone experiences this issue.

They concluded that the issue IS NOT the roof (like I said, it didn't make sense it's the roof - no water on the ceiling or the joists close to the ceiling!), and that our roof actually looks really good.

The issue seems to be condensation due to that stove vent in the wall.

Not only does that vent not vent out (it actually vents into the attic), but there are larger holes on the side that steam could escape through.

The recommended resolution is:

  • temporary: to use metal tape to tape up the sides of the vent and limit the amount of steam coming through. They said this will work in the short term because the amount of condensation is minimal, and isn't likely to cause an issue for quite a while. Then, to caulk the baseboard area (there was a gap between baseboard and wall)

  • long term: to change the vent to one that vents outside instead of into the attic.

We will be doing the short term solution first, and the long term solution probably next year.

VeryConfusedHomeowners
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