On Sunday our 2003 HCH was washed in the driveway. This was the usual method, bucket of soapy water and a hose for rinsing. Afterwards no water in the headlights was seen, but the next morning there was quite a bit on the driver's side, passenger side was dry. Today I took the wet one off the car, shook out most of the water, then dunked it in the bathtub. It would not leak water in or release air bubbles for love or money. Dried off the outside. Since we have very hard water and I didn't want any spots as it dried it was rinsed out a couple of times with distilled water. Then it was filled about 1/3 of the way with distilled water, held up at various angles, to see if it would leak. Again no joy, the only place water would come out was at the 3 bulb holes. The big rubber gasket around the main bulb is in good shape (flexible, no cracks, tight fit), and the rubber washers on the two smaller bulbs seemed to be in good shape too.

Strange. Perhaps the water from the hose (from a nozzle) hit the headlight "just so" to force open a crack somewhere.

After a few hours sitting on the back lawn (100F today) it was bone dry again, with no obvious hard water spots. It would have been half as long but there was a narrow gap between the orange inner lens and the clear outer lens that was full of water which was hard to remove. It was such a narrow space that shaking the headlight would not move the water from that spot. It must have had to evaporate solely from the narrow edge, so it took longer.

To get the headlight off the bumper cover also had to be removed. This car was in a minor front end accident before I bought it (somebody at the company that owned it had bumped into a wall when parking it). I knew the repair job had not been stellar - the metal bar on the buttom where the bumper cover and splash shields are held by plastic rivets is about 1/2 to 1/3 of an inch displaced backwards, making it really hard to put some of those rivets in. They also patched together two breaks in the bottom of the bumper cover rather than replacing it. (It looks like Franken bumper on the bottom, the rest is OK as the plastic on the front and up was not damaged.) That was discovered when I put on some new splash shields. Today when the cover came off it turned out that that shop never put a new energy absorber on the metal bumper! This is the sort of crap that gives auto repair shops such a bad repuation - the part that the customer could not easily check was not done properly.