Rodent Rage

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

Yep, it's gettin' frosty outside and all the little vermin are scrambling to come inside for a warm place to crap. Their beady little eyes are fixed on your house and they're quietly invading at night, while you and your loved ones are sound asleep. A favorite destination: your appliances.

I have repaired many appliances that have been damaged by mouse activity. For example, I recently repaired a fridge that was getting warm because the condenser fan was jammed by a mouse carcass!

The house mouse can live in homes its entire life and reproduce with amazing speed. A female mouse can begin bearing litters of six pups when she is 56 days old. If the offspring begin reproducing at the same time, that means almost 8,000 mice per year can result from one female mouse. That's a lot of rodents running around!

Mice can nest in walls, attics, cabinet space, and appliances, and can accumulate shredded paper and other soft material as bedding. These piles of nest material within the walls or under appliances can pose a fire hazard. Mice gnaw on just about anything; they can even chew through metal, concrete, and wall boards. These pernicious beasts have caused electrical fires by gnawing on wires.

In addition to posing a fire hazard, those cute, furry little critters carry a smorgasbord of diseases that can infect humans. House mice also are a major cause of asthma and allergic rhinitis in susceptible people.

No house is immune. This time of year, I always find evidence of rodent invasions while doing service calls. Most common hangouts: underneath your dishwasher, behind your range and beside your refrigerator's compressor.

Now is the time to take the offensive and terminate the invading hoard with extreme prejudice. Place boxes of Decon in the following key locations around your appliances: behind the refrigerator, underneath the dishwasher (behind the kickplates), behind the range, in the cabinet underneath the sink, and behind the dryer. While you're at it, inspect appliance power cords for damage from chewing.

Personally, I prefer those glue traps with just a dab of peanut butter added. No mouse on the planet can resist peanut butter. I usually only have to leave the trap out overnight and the next day there's a precious little furball-of-love, desperately struggling to get unstuck. But alas, they never quite make it to freedom before meeting their demise at the end of my hammer. The problem with Decon is that you never get to see the fruits of your labor. But using the glue traps, you get a wonderful sense of closure when that hammer falls.

You animal-rights weenies are probably frothing at the mouth about now, sputtering some typically vacuous comments about, "like, hey man, like, they live here, too, y'know?" I want to hear you say that as you're staring in disbelief at the smoldering embers that used to be your house which burned down due to mice chewing on the electrical wires behind the walls.

Awwite, load 'em up, Hoss. We got us some rodents to kill. Yee-haw!

[Akamai]

Just finished cleaning the vent outlet (from dryer).  Hadn't much knowlege about dis stuff before now.  Always wondered about that large HOLE.  Was thinking that the little beasties could get in through it.  Cleaning it allowed the not-so-effective trap door to shut at least. 

This is EXCELLENT INFO 

SUPREME KUDOS TO YOU SAMURAI-SAN   !!!!!!!!!!!!

Aloha a nui loa !

[FatMan]

Removed two meeces from Ge blower housing today, what fun what joy  P U:fart:

[Pegi]

We had to remove a rat from the blower housing in a WP dryer a few years ago, what the dude did not mention when he called was it got in there two weeks previous, then HO went on vacation, in the middle of summer in Texas, THEN he calls us when he gets back, we had no clue till the tech gets there, did not take him long to find out how long it had been baking inside the dryer...:poison:

[Jedi Appliance Guy]

  I recently went on a dishwasher leak and this is what I found.  He ate the rubber hose  on the fill valve outlet also

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

Damn, I can understand those vermin chewing a hole in the tubing, but that one musta had an eating disorder. A mouse didn't do that-- that had to be a rat the size of a small dog.

[Pegi]

Perhaps one of those huge lizards down there in Florida, they look big enough to eat the whole hose!!

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

Or maybe TWO of 'em!

[stormking275]

We use to have a terrible time with mice in the house - they were literally running thru our living romm and kitchen. Tried decon, traps, etc. We finally tried an ultrasonic pest repeller - you plug it into an outlet and it emits a sound that the mice don't agree with. We have not seen a mouse since and that was over a year ago. Highly recommend them and they are pretty cheap to buy.

[Stovepype]

I have found that if I use regular sandwich bread on traps, I catch those critters faster that peanut butter.  I have put them side by side on traps and the one with the bread is the one they go to first.  Just thought you'd like to know.

Stovepype

[Kiwi-nadian]

The worst I ever saw was when I was called to a dead (no go) chest freezer, I walked in to garage and was accosted by a terrible smell.  The owner said it had been like that for a few days, but he couldn't find the source.   I suspected I was going to.............  2 dead rats, in the compressor area.   1 initial fatality, the other decided to take advantage of a bad situation (this is all hearsay, mind you) and consume his unfortunate companion, and fried himself (and the freezer t/stat) whilst attacking the stomach.  Then the stomach started to leak bile,eating into the wiring, and after a couple of days, aided buy the water leaking down the t/stat capillary and the flys, the whole lot turned into a nice compact festering mess, which of course, I had to deal with to save $1000 worth of meat.  I suppose there has to be a down side to this most glamourous of jobs (at least we're not plumbers, eh!)

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

That's one of the most disgusting things I've ever read. Well done, Kiwi!

[Pegi]

:shock::poison:

[Guest ace the dragon]

New here but have been around the block a few times. Got a chuckle of the rodent problems found my share. But the king of the list still remains the cat in the satatic condenser .poor thing musta struggled for days.  Lady had always wondered what happen to that one.Makes me shutter to this day 12 years later.

 

Tom

[cbabonis]

All funny and very insightful stories.  I feel compelled to advise against the mouse/rat poison as a cure though.  Unless you enjoy the STANK of rotting mouse carcass in your house.  Particularly if you live in an old house as we do.  They eat the poison and then creep away into your walls were you can't reach them to get them unless you rip out 200 year old plaster and lath.  So then your stuck with the stank until it reaches the dry and dusty stage.  Not so nice, and as you all seem to be aware, no amount of air-freshener in the world and cover that up.

[DGCYS]

Bread,Bacon etc. work well in traps, But the killer is to wrap 20-30 turns of thread around the bait. It always

snags their teeth and insures they won't rob the bait.

D.

[ZooKeeper]

Rodent poison, like Decon, works by dehydrating the affected beastie.  Severely.  Dehydrating.  The rodent dehydrates to the point of death so that all that remains is a dried carcass.  Little smell is typically associated with a dried dead animal.

There are always exceptions, of course.

 

[Northern-Tech]

  Heres one that I seen a fellow do, when he was camping. He took a pail......filled it 3/4 full of water........stapled a string to a small narrow piece of wood.........tied the string from one side of the pail to the other, and smeared peanut butter in the middle. The mouse would walk along the wood, but then when he got out so far, the wood turned, dropping the mouse into the water. Worked excellent!

[Crouching Tiger]

Two experiences come to mind about dead animals.  The first is when a customer dropped off his 30 year old chest freezer to have it disposed of in the summer.  Usually we take the lid off but we were too busy so we piled junk on top for the next 3 or 4 days.  Then we noticed black gook oozing from the rusted out bottom.  When I opened the lid it was full of rotting animal carcass, perhaps beaver or maybe racoon.  Either way the smell was enough for the cast of CSI to throw up. 

The next one was when we dropped of a customer's Miele washer after a week in the shop and she wanted us to take a look at her Sub-(standard)Zero freezer.  When the door was opened there were at rough count 20-30 frozen kittys flat as a pizza and ready to serve.  I should have phoned the SPCA right there but at that time I wasn't in the position to save the world from a cat hating crazed woman and so we declined to repair and we peeled outa there like the Dukes of Hazzard.  Meeeooowwww!

[Luther]

I have had at least six complaints about GE refrigerators poor or intermittent cooling problems with the cause being mice trapped in the condenser fan between the shroud and a fan blade causing the motor to stall.  Extracting the de-hydrated mouse resulted in satisfactory restoration of performance in four of these problems but in two instances the fan motor had to be replaced!  Impedence protection works up to a point.

And one complaint on a GE dryer that smelled bad resulted in finding a very dead, very rotten squirrel inside the dryer duct at the discharge side of the blower.  The smell was exactly like my opinion of GE laundry products. 

I have told many customers that "if I had a daughter working in a house of Ill Repute and had a GE washer or dryer in my laundry room I would not be able to sleep well until I replaced the GE products! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Luther]

And one call from a lady about a washer that had "tripped the circuit breaker". 

It's down here she said as I entered the side door by the basement stairwell.  I stopped at the second step as several cats scurried by and I was met with an horrendous smell of ammonia.  She said "I have 21 cats but they are harmless"!!! The odor was absolutely terrible and after checking her washer I found the power cord had been liquified by the urine fumes and the wires had shorted together. 

The odor had permeated my clothes and I could do nothing until I showered and changed clothes before checking in again with Luther:  260 724-2463.

I now introduce those customers of mine with computers to this website and encourage them to explore the wealth of advice which is at hand and accept the challenge of self repair with a resource of diagnosis and parts availability right in their home, except those with cats.

Dogs have owners, cats have staff.                                                                   . 

 

  

[sheldontv]

:)heres one which caught me out in a microwave i recently serviced....

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

Great pic, Sheldon! Looks like a fresh kill.

[sheldontv]

:Dit makes you wonder how it got in there in the first place.....maybe it was there  when the microwave was first built-if so then what happened to the quality control  inspection ??.......

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

Rodent Rage... Feline Style:

(click it for a larger view... if you dare!)