Rat Tale

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Pizzazz
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Joined: Thu Nov 28, 2013 7:39 pm

Rat Tale

Post by Pizzazz »

Hi Gang

I have always heard that rats can eat your electrical wiring, but never
believed it...

I was helping a friend debug why his lights above his sink were not
working. We took apart the casement, and when I pulled on the fixture to
remove it, the fixture came off with a small leg of 14AWG copper Romex.

What caught my eye was the end of the wire had not been cut by tools,
but by the teeth of a rat! Never mind that there were rat droppings in the
casement enclosure, but to actually see evidence of this “wives tale” was
a shock to me (no pun intended). The black insulation was removed all
the way to the outer romex

I had heard that rats could chew through electrical wire, but 14 AWG
including the insulation?

I am now a believer.


Two shots at 2x Notice the gouges in the white insulation and copper

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2 shots at 5x.

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Image

Saul
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Post by Saul »

Great story

rjlittlefield
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Re: Rat Tale

Post by rjlittlefield »

Pizzazz wrote:I had heard that rats could chew through electrical wire, but 14 AWG
including the insulation?

I am now a believer.
Nice story, nice images!

https://www.earthkind.com/blog/what-sur ... w-through/ lists rat teeth at 5.5 on the Mohs scale for hardness.

Meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scal ... l_hardness says that copper is only around 3 and aluminum is even a little softer than that.

So I guess it's not really a matter of "Can a rat chew through a wire?" -- more like just "Does he want to?"

--Rik

Pizzazz
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Post by Pizzazz »

I suppose the rodent was hungry.

Simply amazing.

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Why do they do that?

Edit: Google says they just do it to wear down their teeth, which grow continuously and need to be kept short. They also make nests out of bits of wires and insulation.

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

Rodents and wires--a horrible combination. We don't have rats here, but we do have field mice, chipmunks, several species of arboreal squirrels, and groundhogs. Some of them apparently love to chew car wiring.

My first such repair cost op\ver $400; then on another vehicle, $1200. A family member had a $500 repair bill for the same reason. Then the car I'd spent $1,200 on suddenly stopped working and threw up so many error codes that I junked it after receiving stratospheric estimates just for diagnosis. Was it the rodents again? I don't know, but they are strong suspects.

Tooth-maintenance is likely one reason the critters do this. But since the early 2000's car makers have been using soy-based bio-plastics as insulation for wiring. What could possibly go wrong with coating wires in rodent food?

The excuse for using the soy materials is to avoid petroleum and be "green," which seems like nonsense given the trivial contribution of a car's wiring to the amount of petroleum it consumes during its life. However, soy-based bio-plastics are cheaper, which likely has more to do with it.

I've tried wrapping exposed wiring with capsaicin-infused tape made by Honda. This may or may not work. But since pepper plants apparently evolved capsaicin to discourage rodents from eating their seeds, perhaps it will. (And just in case, we built a second garage.)

--Chris S.

JW
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Location: New Haven, CT, USA

Post by JW »

I was a skeptic also; didn't have an incident, but there were mouse droppings coming from can lights that extended into the attic; long story short - ended up removing all of the attic insulation, fumigating and blocking access points, and then replacing with boron-containing repellant insulation, all in the coldest week of last February. Nice to see the evidence, and glad there wasn't a fire.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - Henry David Thoreau

dolmadis
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Location: UK

Post by dolmadis »

Not a car but a washing machine at my home was the target. It stopped working and we called the repair man. He showed us how the whole wiring loom had been chewed through. Not a warranty item but with one look at the pile of nappies he kindly replaced the loom for us. Then we gave a home to three cats.

BR

John

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

Squirrels are a problem around here. They ate thru the gas hose on our Ford F150, then made a nest in my intake filter area on my 911 twin turbo (has a big air filter), ate thru the cooling cover on my older Porsche 993 911. They also make a point of chewing acorns and whatever right over your car in the trees, as well as "other" not so pleasant droppings!!

Best,

Mike
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike

brentbristol
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Location: New Berlin WI

Post by brentbristol »

LOL, I recently had to encase my outdoor internet cable run in conduit because of rats!
The trouble with quick and dirty is that the dirty remains after the quick is gone.

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